Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by BackBlast 917 days ago
There's room for different opinions.

His font choice is terrible for my legibility. Maybe for others it's great. But it made the already difficult article that much harder to read. And I like this topic. I already seriously question his sense of what is reasonable and good and for what purpose. His purposes are so alien to mine that his opinion ends up being pretty irrelevant to mine. I wish him well with his.

I can't see the things he's pointing out in the images, and I tried and tried.

I use webp extensively, there have been zero complaints from users about the images. But I don't make art sites. I make software people use to get stuff done. I don't transfer images above maybe 50-80k. Art, aside from modest marketing, is most definitely not the point.

2 comments

If you tried and couldn't see, it might be like others say that it's more visible on certain monitors and setups. But then, again - if you are designing codecs or choosing them, you probably want a monitor that makes it easy to see these things. I can see them on my old iPhone screen.

It reminds me of how sometimes you see a huge billboard hideously strong 10 foot wide JPEG compression artifacts. It was someone's job to make those, too.

> But then, again - if you are designing codecs or choosing them, you probably want a monitor that makes it easy to see these things

You keep bringing this up. I don't really care. Someone designing a codec may have put this apparent problem case on the don't-care list as well. I would be in general agreement with the designer's priorities for a reasonable web codec.

I have, with some care, selected webp as a general codec for web use on most of my sites. Nobody is complaining, and my page weights and development speed is improved. I don't have to fret between png+transparency and jpg to minimize asset size while maintaining it's usability. I just use webp and most of the time it's a size/speed win with good enough quality.

Not every codec needs to be artist and photographer approved.

> His font choice is terrible for my legibility.

There may be a connection [1].

If we assume some of the people designing codecs, that he curses in this piece, end up reading it, he may simply have wanted to make sure they do remember. ;)

[1] https://hbr.org/2012/03/hard-to-read-fonts-promote-better-re...