Imgpls – An extension to load Imgur images directly

Internet commenting has definitely taught me many times that it is actually really hard to convey what you're thinking accurately.

For many, many years, content negotiation was not adversarial, and there was little reason to believe it ever would be. Until it was, of course.

So how do we fix it, telling every page view we'd prefer if it were a JPEG? Probably not. Of course, you could make "Open Image in New Tab" do some magic to ensure that it acts like an image fetch: that sounds like a good idea.

> What non user-hostile things does it enable?

Content negotiation in general is pretty good. In theory, it lets a web server pick the best possible format that is supported by your client. For example, it would be possible for the server to transparently serve you a JPEG XL-compressed JPEG if your browser supports it, or fall back to the original (identical but larger) JPEG image if it does not.

Is there a good reason to prefer text/html? I know this will be unpopular but I believe that "upgrading" GIF links to WebMs in <video> tags is not user hostile in and of itself. GIF89a is a pretty antiquated format and LZW compression of 8bpc frame deltas is not exactly state of the art anymore; the difference between a GIF and a WebM of the same thing is usually multiple megabytes of bandwidth, and that can be extremely annoying, especially on mobile clients. Of course if you make it hard to access the original file, this will reasonably irritate people, but I think broadly the idea behind it is reasonable.

Being able to distinguish a navigation fetch from an <img> fetch is actually good because it would let the server behave in a more user-friendly fashion on the navigation fetch, for example by serving only formats that would be most likely to be useful to the user. Unfortunately, we can't have nice things, so it seems like some day content negotiation will have to be partly gimped.