cainoct
@cainoct

(This is a very old version of Mutant Standard, but it's still illustrative.)

I think Lossy WebP is a bad format, mainly because the generation loss is really bad and it doesn't appreciably provide any feature improvements. (I'm all on the JPEG XL train because it's so much more holistic as a format and actually does some really handy things for compression and web image delivery that wouldn't just be good for big CDNs or whatever.)

So, Mutant Standard has more than 8000 emoji in the current set because of all the modifiers, that's a lot of images, and it can be slow to load them in say, an emoji picker. I've played with image formats (including experimental/next gen ones) a lot because for me, the more accessible Mutant Standard is, the better.

In my own tests, Lossless WebPs are appreciably smaller for Mutant Standard emoji at least than compared to a crushed PNG, that's helpful, especially for people in the US and elsewhere with poor internet connectivity.


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in reply to @cainoct's post:

There are actually some pretty good reasons, also something I forgot to mention:

  1. Browsers are really fast and loose with SVG rendering and will show artifacts in many cases, especially when you scale something down really small like emoji.
  2. Mutant's style lends itself very well to small SVG assets because of it's simplicity and the fact they're vector designs to begin with - the same could not be said for other similar types of image sets that are made in rasterisation, for instance.
  3. I forgot to mention this but those 'optimised' SVGs were using an SVG optimiser that actually fucked a bunch of the geometry in the assets and I had to stop using it.
  4. SVGs are trickier to implement and they pose security risks in certain environments.