On Mon, Dec 4, 2017 at 10:34 AM Ruben Kelevra ruben@vfn-nrw.de wrote:
Sure, your suggestion avoids a lot of this. But the CPUs involved will experience heavy load, both on the server as well as clients that need to recode FLIF files via a JavaScript library first.
FLIF is very fast to decode via JavaScript, and in general, as the example shown above, it takes just 1 second to decode and encode a medium size image as PNG with just one thread on a pretty outdated notebook with an unoptimized decoder and encoder. :)
Try adding a FLIF to a website and test out if the website load anywhat slower with the FLIF ... at the small image sizes you get on articles, the performance impact is neglectable and comparable to loading a font file to the browser.
Requiring Javascript just to look at an image seems rather ridiculous to me, fast or not. It's just...silly sounding. So my browser doesn't support FLIF...you have to use JS to turn it into some format (PNG) that I can understand...for what, minimal size savings on the order of a few KB? That doesn't seem worth the complexity...
How does it fall back for users with Javascript disabled outright? How fast is it on older hardware? How about mobile? Remember: not everyone has fast desktops or laptops :)
It doesn't look like there's very much support in the authoring area either[0]. So we'd have to encode all uploads to this format. Would we be storing the original PNGs as well, similar to how we store video transcodes in multiple formats? If so, there goes any space savings on WMF's end.
The fact that the Debian RFP for the encoder/decoder has stalled for almost 2 years isn't very promising... [1]
Considering there's effectively zero browser support (comments like [2][3][4] and *especially* [5] are pretty discouraging) it just doesn't seem worth it the technical maintenance to support it on our end.
Don't get me wrong, the format itself seems kinda cool, but I'd be very hesitant to be a pioneer for a new graphics standard that nobody else seems to want to pick up yet.
-Chad
[0] http://flif.info/software.html#graphics-software [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=812761 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1240692#c6 [3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1240692#c8 [4] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=539120#c4 [5] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=539120#c11