Did you ever hear the tragedy of WebP The Efficient? I thought not. It’s not a story the GIF gang would tell you. It’s an image legend.

WebP was a new format of pictures, so efficient and so lightweight, it could use modern compression to influence the web pages to actually load faster…

It had such a knowledge of the user’s needs that it could even keep transparency and animations from dying.

The power of modern computing is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.

It became so widespread… The only thing we had to be afraid of, was people insisting on using formats from the 90’s, which eventually, of course, they did.

Unfortunately, we didn’t teach the noobs everything we knew about compression, then the noobs killed the format by converting it to PNG and sharing that.

Ironic. We could save the web from being too slow, but not from the users.

  • lemme_at_it@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    11 months ago

    Bad name choices abound among software creators. It’s almost a default behaviour, especially in smaller teams or single developer situations. Like the guy who made “crap cleaner” for for his own use; he’d later share it with friends, by the time he released it to the public he was forced to rename it ccleaner, it is still going to this day as one of the most downloaded windows software (2.5 billion downloads). He could have just given it a decent name in the beginning - for free. There is also GIMP, whose name simply keeps it out of serious use, unless you already know it’s capabilities.