WebP? PNG? These two acronyms areunfamiliar to you?
Well, this is mostly interesting for Web designers. WebP
promises higher compression rates than PNG. Unfortu-
nately WebP isn’t supported well by now.

So what’s PNG? PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics and is an image format that supports 24bit color information plus 8bit alpha channel information for transparency.

As GIF only supports one transparency color mask, a new image formathad to hit the web. So the W3C consortium has developed PNG. While GIF with animation is supported by a wide variety of browsers and their engines, the pendant herefore, called APNG is only supported by a handful of them, among these for example is Firefox.

As of now WebP only seems to support still images but with a higher quality upon same compression level. The results are quite stunning. But why is Google trying to involve a new standard for alpha-supported images and not trying to improve the widely common PNG-standard? No one knows for sure.

Well… maybe I am also giving WebP a try. Read more here