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I really want a better alpha-mask standard to emerge. PNG24 is attractive, but huge. PNG8/GIF works well, but is pretty limited.

I don't think WebP is it, but we'll see what comes out of the scrum. I'll work with whatever that is, but I won't waste my time chasing will o' the wisp "standards."

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It's still relatively huge, and not widely supported without a polyfill, but FLIF [0] is a pretty neat format that tends to be smaller than the equivalent PNG, and can be converted to a lossy image "on the fly", and also supports alpha transparency.

The polyfill is still kind of slow, at least compared to native PNG rendering on the browser, but it does work, and hopefully some day it can be integrated into the standard.

[0] http://flif.info

>hopefully some day it can be integrated into the standard.

see jpeg-xl

Some time ago I experimented with a reduced color palette and dithering while keeping the fill alpha info. It reduced the file size a lot while keeping the alpha.

Yeah, there's a number of ways to reduce GIF/PNG8 sizes.

I started writing Web sites in the mid-'90s, where a page was supposed to be about 30K (quaint, huh?).

The prevailing wisdom, then, was no dither, adaptive palette, and reduce the color palette until it hurts, then back up one.

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