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So, theres been a couple of blog posts floating around today, viewpoints on WebP.
I was having a few tweets back and forth with @barryroodt, and we shared some thoughts on it.
Thought Id share my thoughts with you, whoever you are, if indeed there is anyone else reading it.
If you don’t know already, this is about the new image format Google announced: WebP (pronounced weppy).
Iv seen ‘google are trying to take over the web’, and ill just ignore those comments as sensationalist rubbish.
However, I have seen ‘until i can save as webp in photoshop’ i cant use it, and perhaps more profoundly, i cant use it until IE supports it.
Id like to posit the following notion.
We already happily use things like, css3, sifr, basefont, gzipping source etc. These are tools which are not supported ubiquitously, yet using a little ingenuity, we are able to provide a greater experience to those clients that CAN support those technologies.
So, they’ll patch webkit early on. Webkit means chrome, safari, iphone, and ipad will all gain support quickly.
It wont be impossible, or indeed, difficult, to invision a tool that would allow webp support detection at point of request, and serve weppy files to devices and browsers that are able to support it.
This tool wouldn’t involve us doing anything different than we do already. Perhaps ill have to have a crack at writing it.
The benefits of reduced bandwidth speak for themselves, especially on devices where data is at a premium (iphone, ipad). The benefits to people who run high-traffic sites, could be huge too.
We’re talking at least a 10% reduction in bandwidth on an image. If that resulted in 10% reduction site-wide, bandwidth costs would reduce vastly.
Just saying, lets find a way to embrace something that could really help us out in the future.
Just think of the bandwidth.
