Comment on It's an epidemic
lemmyng@lemmy.ca 2 months agoMaybe because in those scenarios PNG offers sharper images, which is more important than compression when you have complex diagrams. Or because webp is more CPU intensive, and PNG gives better performance when rendering. Or because of CVE-2023-4863.
dan@upvote.au 2 months ago
WebP supports both lossy and lossless compression. Diagrams should use lossless compression so the image does not lose any quality.
Images on the web usually aren’t large enough for this to make a significant difference, and it can sometimes be offset by the quicker download time.
libjpeg and libpng have had a number of CVEs too though.
lemmyng@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
WebP did not always support lossless compression. It’s conceivable that the tools’ developers made the decision before that.
That does not fit the use case of diagramming tools. They usually have comparatively few assets that are used multiple times in the same document. The larger the document, the more benefit lower CPU cost has. And I’ve seen LARGE diagrams.
Fair. I’m just speculating that it might be a contributing factor for the tools still not supporting the format.
dan@upvote.au 2 months ago
WebP was first released in 2010, and lossless support was added in 2011. I really doubt there were tools built between 2010 and 2011 that haven’t been updated since then.
SVG is probably a better fit for this use case.
lemmyng@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Absolutely… when available. But many companies/teams do not release SVG artwork. PNG material is much more commonly available, and actually works with these tools.