I know that the SRCERER package includes a single image stack to display WebP image formats, but does the ‘Sizes’ stack accept also WebP images (when e.g. the images are warehoused) ?
Joe Workman showed in one of his recent videos, that even the standard Stacks ‘Site Image’ stack apparently handles WebP images. I guess, any linked image can be in WebP format, as long as the browser can display the image. If true, then the speciality of the dedicated WebP image stacks is that they allow a fallback image ?
If we want to better take advantage of the WebP format, wouldn’t it be helpful then to ‘upgrade’ all image stacks to accept WebP links and offer a fallback option ?
To be honest that would be downgrading the current stacks as it would mean adding more settings in Stacks and more code to the page. And fairly soon Webp will be fully supported in all modern browsers (in fact it pretty much is already).
Just bear in mind that WebP is 10 year old technology and ultimately will be another one of those short lived stepping stone formats. It took browsers too long to adopt it for it to be significant.
AVIF is coming and is a LOT more efficient than WebP.
Only Chrome supports it at present but it will undoubtedly be adopted a lot more quickly than was WebP and will bring dramatic performance improvements.