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Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting how many comments here (presumably from "tech guys") confirm what the author wrote:

> So there is a real issue with the design priorities of image algos from tech guys who clearly lack historical and artistic background, and don’t talk to artists, who anyway have largely decided that they were above science, maths and other menial materialistic concerns.

I am a tech guy, and when a photographer tells me that an image looks worse than another one, if I don't see it, my first reaction is more "can you try to explain to me why it is worse?" and less "I don't see a difference, so you must be wrong".

I would be slightly offended if an artist told me that there was nothing wrong with `if (vAluE < 3 ) {return true; } else {{ return false;}}` just because they cannot see the problem.

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While I agree with the rational component of the article (webp may be inappropriate for artistic photos) I had to force myself to read it. The "t" in the font screws me up completely, I tried twice to wipe the screen of my phone then thought that maybe it's a background picture getting in the way.

So overall I find author's aesthetic sense very questionable which contrasts with his high-moral-ground tone.

Haha, I used iPhone’s reader mode, which I do most of the times.

The "t" or the "ct" ligature?

"st", also.

It's the "historical-ligatures" feature of used font, if you aren't in the reader mode already, F12 and

    document.body.insertAdjacentHTML('beforeend','<style>p { font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures discretionary-ligatures contextual;}</style>')

should turn it off. (Was "too much" for me either.)

But besides this, I found typography of that article quite nice; interesting that there are thin spaces before "?" and "!" and wide spaces (not double spaces) after sentences - also "old school" (and often frowned upon). I guess some WP plugin does it, but I admit don't remember seeing seen this anywhere else recently. (And I like it.)

Wow I am reading it at 170% zoom, and in the fourth paragraph the word "distribution" which contains the "st" ligature is automatically cut and "hyphenated" between the "s" and the "t" letters. But the ligature remains : half the ligature at the end of one line, and the other half of that ligature at the beginning of the next line ! This looks wrong. CSS has probably missed an edge case here. Or is it the job of some "text renderer" in the browser ?

For me it's the horrible layout. For God's sake, stop making narrow columns of text. Having the text take up most of my monitor is much more pleasant to read.

I think the opposite. When text in a webpage takes up all my monitor's width, I go into Developer Tools and manually add a max-width rule so that I can read the text comfortably.

And AFAIK, all HCI literature seems to agree with me.

Long lines of text cause significantly more eye strain than reasonably short ones. Generally, one should try to have ~80 characters per line of text.

Research suggests optimal line length is 50-75 characters

https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability

Discretional ligatures… well, they require discretion, which the author seems to sorely lack.

Tech guy working in media here. 100x this. I often can't tell the (perceptive) difference between video encoded with codec A and B, but I do have objective metrics such as bitrate, framerate, CPU/GPU power required to encode/decode, device quirks, etc. When I doubt, I always defer my decision until after I can consider the input from my colleagues.

I think it's more "the target audience for webp is people closer to and arguably less trained than my eyes and I can't see a difference" which is a pretty reasonable take. But tech people aren't typically the best communicators and so I'm not at all surprised it comes off crass.

mp3 is "worse" than flac but if you say it sounds bad I'll absolutely tell you you're wrong and to get off Hi-Fi forums.

If your goal is to batch convert a wide variety of lossily-compressed source material at a significantly lower bitrate without obvious loss of fidelity, MP3 is not great.

That appears to be the author's specific complaint against WEBP, and seems fair.

First of all, the tone of the article invites equally acerbic criticism. Calling devs “image coding douchebags” is not exactly going to win anyone over.

Secondly, there’s a bizarre assumption here that someone can’t be both a tech guy and an artist, which is nonsense.

Thirdly, there’s a likely incorrect assumption here that artists weren’t consulted, or that the authors of the format weren’t aware of the tradeoffs that were being made.

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