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Indeed, once you officially support a format and it becomes a standard, you have to support it forever. Sunsetting a feature is not that easy on the web. So if
by skywal_l 4y ago
Indeed, once you officially support a format and it becomes a standard, you have to support it forever. Sunsetting a feature is not that easy on the web. So if for some reason the maintainer of a library used by the browser drops the ball you are on the hook for anything. And decoding binary data coming from unknown potentially malicious source is full of potential security traps.
- toastal 4y agoConsidering <picture> and image() exists and should be seen as a best practice, adding and removing image formats/codecs should have a few less problems than some other libraries, no?
- eyelidlessness 4y agoThey provide some resilience, assuming their fallback usage includes multiple formats. Which isn’t a safe assumption, but even granting it, there are other problems with removing a codec. The most obvious being abruptly increasing the bandwidth requirements for all users of the removed codec. Even if that bandwidth is “free”, it can be significant enough to prevent access by end users with slow/spotty connections. Depending on the use case, that can have the consequence of also basically obsoleting the site serving those users. Just as some innovations enable whole new use cases, reverting the innovation can have the opposite effect.