What learning react won't teach you: Image Formats

https://idiallo.com/blog/react-and-image-format

13•foxfired•5mo ago

Comments

jagthebeetle•5mo ago

A bit of a nit, but the 17kb PNG actually looks slightly blurry, or "artifact-ed" on my MacBook screen. Happily though, the author included a section on SVG at the bottom, which was my knee-jerk reaction for the appropriate format for lettering at that scale.

wmf•5mo ago

It seems weird to blame React for this.

zahlman•5mo ago

Do front-end devs really not know this sort of thing in 2025? I haven't done serious web development since the jQuery days and it's still second nature to me. (Granted, WebP barely existed at that point.) Honestly, when I was growing up this sort of thing was something ordinary users would know about.

firefoxd•5mo ago

In the days of jquery, it was much more common for people to worry about file size and load time. With faster mobile internet, there are less incentives to learn about image formats and their benefits. Many developers coming from bootcamps often lack this knowledge.

politelemon•5mo ago

I'm sorry but they do not. React is used as a cargo crutch for web development these days. Its necessity is not considered for problem solving, it is simply assumed as needed, based on learning by rote. What you now have is a legion of web developers who pay little attention to optimisation both within the framework and in general without.

sxp•5mo ago

> This is a SVG. Only 2KB!

That's the uncompressed size. Since most production webservers use compression, the actual transfered data according to Chrome's Inspector was .9kb. Ironically, the favicon.ico was a 32kb file that compressed to 4.3kb and was loaded when I looked at https://cdn.idiallo.com/images/assets/527/ping_svg.svg

jemmyw•5mo ago

React tutorials shouldn't cover this. They're for learning React. Otherwise every tutorial for anything web based would need to include all the basics about the web too, every time.

I don't have an answer for where the best place to learn it in the course of becoming a dev. I learnt this stuff over 25 years ago when I was a teenager. The thing is, it was a necessity then. Now I can download a whole movie in less time than a poorly optimized webpage in the 90s. So while I still obsessively try to get the smallest best looking images when I'm doing frontend dev, I'm not sure it's really worth my time.

The author mentions automated tooling and I can see that being the best middle ground these days.

France's homegrown open source online office suite

British drivers over 70 to face eye tests every three years

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

First Proof

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

The Waymo World Model

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

Google staff call for firm to cut ties with ICE

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

A Fresh Look at IBM 3270 Information Display System

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

What Is Ruliology?

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

An Update on Heroku

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

Show HN: Kappal – CLI to Run Docker Compose YML on Kubernetes for Local Dev

Cross-Region MSK Replication: K2K vs. MirrorMaker2

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

How to effectively write quality code with AI

Dark Alley Mathematics