"A new Image format for the Web"
Through the desire to
optimize websites/web applications, Google have realized a need to provide a
new image format that has one of the best image compressions currently for the
web. What gravitated me to this format are the properties that have been
mentioned which will give graphics and web designers the best quality image as
possible while maintaining background transparency and even allowing the
imagine to have a similar animation property as GIF. In essence, to outdo JPEG,
PNG and GIF. Google is trying to foster a file format that allows for smaller
file sizes and ultimately faster web page downloads.
A large proportion
of websites nowadays are made up of images. With a new image compression such
as WebP, there will definitely be reduction in load time of web pages. JPEG has
been widely used on websites due to the small file sizes that are associated
with it; however, it does not provide a transparent background as required on a
variety of modern websites.
A huge drawback for WebP,
atleast in this initial stage is that one of the world most popular
imagine-editing software does not currently support writing or reading of this
format. Similarly from web browsers prospective, only Google chrome and Opera
supports WebP as of the posting of this article.
With those kinks ironed
out WebP is expected to be a very competitive file format that will hopefully
speedup graphics on the web.
