28 replies

1. Matt Wilcox 3 min later

   @zachleat Been debating this all year, and checking caniuse, and debating, and checking. I think it’s safe. But I still haven’t removed those JPG “fallbacks” yet.

2. Stuart Langridge 10 min later

   @zachleat not sure what "baseline" means. If it's <img src="/fediverse/zachleat@fediverse.zachleat.com/111416997301771801/thing.webp"> then ahahaha no chance.
   If <picture><source srcset="thing.webp" type="image/webp"><img src="/fediverse/zachleat@fediverse.zachleat.com/111416997301771801/thing.png"></picture> counts as "using webp as a baseline" then totally, no problem with that. (Although if you're doing that anyway, then might as well add avif, etc, etc.)

   1. Zach Leatherman 16 min later

      @sil I meant baseline as in <img src="thing.webp" alt="…">, yep!

      1. Stuart Langridge 33 min later

         @zachleat voted for "I would not currently do this" :-) On the grounds that there's very little reason to do it; if you're switched-on enough to know about webp then you can write <picture> instead of <img>, and making multiple versions of your images is a one-time-only effort.

         1. Khoi 6 hr later

            @sil @zachleat why?

            My blog (https://blog.imkhoi.com) current uses .WEBP and has had no issues. Most browsers support .WEBP nowadays.

            1. Stuart Langridge 10 hr later

               @khoi @zachleat ...exactly because you used the word "most" there, is why :) I agree; it'd probably be fine to use webp alone everywhere, but being sure of that is hard. I am sure of it for pngs and jpegs. So, if I put any effort into thinking about this question whatsoever, I might as well put that effort into using both inside a <picture>, and that's what I do.

               1. Adrian Roselli 12 hr later

                  @sil @khoi @zachleat This (for why I voted no on WebP).

                  I also have learned Can I Use is not guaranteed to be accurate and browser vendors (Safari) actively tweak support charts via PRs to make their support for a technology look better than it is. I no longer decide based on its charts.

                  Also also, lack of support outside browsers given the images I use sometimes get pulled into non-web contexts.

                  1. Florian Schroiff 13 hr later

                     @aardrian @sil @khoi @zachleat avif is “kinda” supported on iOS. I see it in the browser, I can save it to the photos app, but when I share it in messages it displays as a data file. Very irritating.

3. Evan 14 min later

   @zachleat given Safari 16 - 17 (with full support) released just over a year ago, no, at least not without fallback formats.

4. John M. Gamble 17 min later

   @zachleat

   "Never" is a bit much, so it's not my choice, but currently? Nope.

   But in as little as ten years? Maybe so.

   1. Zach Leatherman 18 min later

      @jgamble whew, you’re right that copy is bad—I edited the options

5. Zach Leatherman 19 min later

   as @jgamble noted, the use of "Never" in the first poll option was not quite good enough—I’ve edited the options which means y’all get to vote again 😅

6. Seirdy 29 min later

   @zachleat Not all clients are browsers, so no. Then there’s not just image viewing programs, but also image thumbnailers, messaging apps…

   If you sent an image to get printed on an ID card, how likely do you think it is to work with WebP? Hell, Bing can barely handle PNG favicons.

   I wouldn’t expect WebP to be supported by default.

7. Alexis Deveria 30 min later

   @zachleat This is funny to me because I recently added a few images to the caniuse site and I only used webp 😅 Fairly comfortable with that given the audience.

8. Cory Birdsong 43 min later

   @zachleat I have been advising to keep JPEG as the canonical copy and generate webp/avif from that since you can generate a JPEG XL version from it losslessly, unlike webp

9. samf 47 min later

   @zachleat the secret true answer here is “it’s already the baseline because any website at CDN scale (Cloudflare, etc) is already likely automatically converting images to WebP if there’s a significant file size improvement” 😅

10. Mu-An 1 hr later

    @zachleat the cost for graceful degradation on this is too high imo.

11. Private reply 4 hr later
12. elle mundy 5 hr later

    @zachleat it might be just slightly early, but i’d go with it, depending on the audience. if ~100% compatibility and/or support for older devices is a goal, perhaps offering a fallback to jpeg with a <picture> tag might cover it

13. moth 11 hr later

    @zachleat webp is barely supported at all outside of browsers; there's a reason people hate it
14. kaiserkiwi 12 hr later

    @zachleat Depends on the target group. But in most cases it should be definitely safe.

15. ｔｏ⟁ｓｔ⟁ｌ 12 hr later

    @zachleat I choose JPG/PNG as a base but also ship JPEG XL

16. Private reply 14 hr later
17. knaaaaaack 1 day later

    @zachleat mastodon polls are very energetic

18. Matt Kane 1 day later

    @zachleat Really it's there same question as "am I ok with this site only targeting modern browsers". For a personal project, or something where the audience will be likely to have that then sure. If it's a business thing then so way. Of course the real answer is use a CDN or picture tag.

19. Dusty Pomerleau 7 days later

    @zachleat I use AVIF with WebP fallback. I think the more interesting debate is about the future of JXL:

    https://dev.to/jonarnes/get-ready-for-jpeg-xl-today-204j

    https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1178058#c84

20. lonjil 28 days later

    @zachleat apologies for barging in on an old post like this, but I believe jpegli, a new jpeg encoder from the JXL people, will be released next year. In what testing I've done and seen from other people, the JPEGs it produces are smaller and higher quality than what cwebp can do. So to me even if webp is a safe choice, I see little reason to use it when legacy jpeg continues to improve year after year.

    1. Zach Leatherman 28 days later

       @lonjil it does seem to be between a rock and a hard place right now