webp – S-Config

JXL – JPEGXL and the web experience here.

September 8, 2022September 23, 2021 by S-Config

Addressing the JXL or JPegXL format floating around the internet.

We’re going to do something we usually do not do for ANY of our blog articles. We’re going to purposefully STOP all optimization of our files in this entry and only use ONLY PNG files (Blog article only, navigation, footer, and backgrounds will still be processed. It may sound totally counterproductive to do when making an article about a new format that the developers insist that you use. However, in order to graphically demonstrate my points about the “New kid on the image war block,” we must go totally lossless with a codec we trust and has been proven for almost 20 years.

Now, for those users running nightly builds of Chrome or Firefox that want to test out JXL Good news! Every article EXCEPT this one has already been encoded thanks to scripting mentioned in this blog article. So once you’ve enabled JXL in your browser (details described below) you can explore this site with it and see if it’s really all of the hype it’s meant to be!

Read on if you care about my rants and opinions of this format.

Nginx and the Image format wars.

September 8, 2022September 21, 2021 by S-Config

We’ve talked about the videos, we’ve talked about the images. Now we talk about the web server, Nginx.

In this entry, we’re going to get crazy technical with how we deploy all of these new image formats that are being introduced in what feels like “The Great Video/Image War” to finally put GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs, and MP4s to bed. But instead, we’re going to talk about a section that seems skipped a lot. How do we actually implement these new formats? Because if we do a review on an image format, it’s good. Then as bloggers, it would be hypocritical to not apply these formats to our site. It however opens up questions. How do we maintain the security of our readers while at the same time giving them the very best image with the lowest bandwidth conceivable? Thankfully since we have a VPS a lot of the encoding is handled via CRON. While a lot of the deciding factors of which browser gets served and what file are all in the hands of NGINX web daemon.

Read on if you want to know more.

WebP image format wars.

June 13, 2022November 6, 2016 by S-Config

WebP from Google will deliver faster internet to you. But at what cost?

WebP is something I found out by total accident when asking the simple question of:

Why does Google Chrome not support animated .PNG files?
– S

It turns out Google instead of including the format into the library on their browser decided instead to exclude it. Although you can simply download an animated PNG plugin for Chrome here. That’s not the point. The point is it should be natively supported which it is not. ~~If Google finally did support animated PNG files then~~ Google now supports APNG which now we can put an axe into animated .GIF files. A Format which is still in use since the late 1980’s! Animated GIF files are now old enough to run for president of the United States! However, Google’s attitude was as follows:

Why spend any more time on other formats like PNG and JPG when WebP will be cooler!

Note: This issue with Google Chrome as of 7/25/2017 has now been resolved but the entry still stand for archival reasons.

Read on if you want to see more.