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There are no browser compatibility issues if you use conservative HTTP content negotiation. Browsers which support WebP can say so in their HTTP Accept headers,
by pjscott 16y ago
There are no browser compatibility issues if you use conservative HTTP content negotiation. Browsers which support WebP can say so in their HTTP Accept headers, and the server can serve WebP to those browsers, falling back on ordinary JPEG for older browsers. This was also used back when PNG support was spotty, by sites which wanted to combine the goodness of PNG with the ubiquity of GIF. It's actually pretty simple:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_negotiation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_negotiation
Now that I think about it, there's probably a business opportunity for someone who handles such hosting issues for image-heavy web sites. The porn industry may seem sketchy, but they have a lot of money and a pressing need to keep overhead down.
- mhd 16y agoYes, but it has to have some significant effect. For this to happen, the gain from the format conversion has to matter for the porn sites use case, this has to be a certain percentage of bandwidth (wonder how that's for video sites), and then the amount of browser who support it (not just advertise it, cf. IE and its PNG "support") has to be high enough. Anybody got some statistics on browser distribution on a major *tube site? I guess we'll see a lot of Internet Explorer there, although it Chrome's "incognito" mode may have found some fans.
- pjscott 16y agoThe cost of format conversion can be made very low by having it done automatically by the web server. It'll just take some time for the software to do that.