5% of people can't view them, yet 25% of top websites use them?
In what other industry would it be considered acceptable to exclude 5% of visitors/users/clients?
In what other industry would it be considered acceptable to exclude 5% of visitors/users/clients?
See CSS image-set : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/image/image...
Rational, or economical? I find it rational to help someone in need since I'd want others to do the same to me, even if it's not financially profitable for me. Imo more factors flow into what's rational, but I understand what you mean by corporate greed working this way (less than 10% of people are blind, neither male nor female, run a free operating system or can't afford a new computer, etc., so yep they're not profitable groups and for-profits don't optimise for that)
If a corporation has determined that profit maximization is their core tenet, excluding the needs of a minority of users can likely be deduced in a rational manner from that tenet. That is precisely why values need to be forced onto corporate actors through regulation, e.g. in this case through mandatory accessibility guidelines like EU directive 2019/882 that enters into force this very week.
Or Linux users? Or even Firefox users in our market?
As for Linux users… I do recall they were even less than the 3%. Firefox users were more tho.
In any case, I’m almost sure most Linux users were fine. We just didn’t wanted to support old browsers.
That's not how it works.
The server declares what versions of media it has, and the client requests a supported media format. The same trick have been used for audio and video for ages too.
Example:
<picture>
<source srcset="a.webp" type="image/webp">
<img src="fallback.jpg">
</picture>Will say though that it's not universal, it depends heavily on the corner of the internet you're on.
But even beyond that, most file formats have a bit of a header at the start of the file that declares the actual format of the file. Browsers already can understand that and use the correct render for a file without an extension.
Images are often at different resolutions too, that way, depending on the pixel density of the device, and the physical size, the browser can select the photo that has high enough resolution, but not one that is needlessly large, while also selecting the preferred image format.
Note that I'm looking at "all tracked," which excludes 2% "other" browsers in the data whose featureset is not known.
e.g. cars - not everyone is physically able to drive books - blind people can't read music - deaf people can't hear
It is a form of 80/20 or 90/10 rule the last small percentage costs as much as the majority.
(Also, the parent comment's example is also not so good because as someone else pointed just because the top 25% websites are serving webp it does mean they're not serving alternative formats for those who does not support it, as this is quite trivial to setup)