Media 2024

[nrllh]

Media 2024

If you're interested in contributing to the Media chapter of the 2024 Web Almanac, please reply to this issue and indicate which role or roles best fit your interest and availability: author, reviewer, analyst, and/or editor. You might be interested in exploring the changes to this year's version here.

Content team

Lead	Authors	Reviewers	Analysts	Editors	Coordinator
-	-	@svgeesus, @nhoizey, @eeeps	@foolip, @nucliweb, @eeeps	@MichaelLewittes	@turban1988

Expand for more information about each role 👀

• The content team lead is the chapter owner and responsible for setting the scope of the chapter and managing contributors' day-to-day progress.
• Authors are subject matter experts and lead the content direction for each chapter. Chapters typically have one or two authors. Authors are responsible for planning the outline of the chapter, analyzing stats and trends, and writing the annual report.
• Reviewers are also subject matter experts and assist authors with technical reviews during the planning, analyzing, and writing phases.
• Analysts are responsible for researching the stats and trends used throughout the Almanac. Analysts work closely with authors and reviewers during the planning phase to give direction on the types of stats that are possible from the dataset, and during the analyzing/writing phases to ensure that the stats are used correctly.
• Editors are technical writers who have a penchant for both technical and non-technical content correctness. Editors have a mastery of the English language and work closely with authors to help wordsmith content and ensure that everything fits together as a cohesive unit.
• The section coordinator is the overall owner for all chapters within a section like "User Experience" or "Page Content" and helps to keep each chapter on schedule.

Note: The time commitment for each role varies by the chapter's scope and complexity as well as the number of contributors.

For an overview of how the roles work together at each phase of the project, see the Chapter Lifecycle doc.

Milestone checklist

0. Form the content team

• 📆 April 15 Complete program and content committee - 🔑 Organizing committee
  • The content team has at least one author, reviewer, and analyst.

1. Plan content

• 📆 May 1 First meeting to outline the chapter contents - 🔑 Content team
  • The content team has completed the chapter outline.

2. Gather data

• 📆 June 1 Custom metrics completed - 🔑 Analysts
  • Analysts have added all necessary custom metrics and drafted a PR (example) to track query progress.
• 📆 June 1 HTTP Archive Crawl - 🔑 HA Team
  • HTTP Archive runs the June crawl.

3. Validate results

• 📆 August 15 Query Metrics & Save Results - 🔑 Analysts
  • Analysts have queried all metrics and saved the output.

4. Draft content

• 📆 September 15 First Draft of Chapter - 🔑 Authors
  • Authors has written the chapter.
• 📆 October 10 Review & Edit Chapter - 🔑 Reviewers & Editors
  • Reviewers and Editors has processed the the chapter.

5. Publication

• 📆 October 15 Chapter Publication (Markdown & PR) - 🔑 Authors
  • Authors has converted the chapter to markdown and drafted a PR.
• 📆 November 1 Launch of 2024 Web Almanac 🚀 - 🔑 Organizing committee

6. Virtual conference

• 📆 November 20 Virtual Conference - 🔑 Content Team

Chapter resources

Refer to these 2024 Media resources throughout the content creation process:
📄 Google Docs for outlining and drafting content
🔍 SQL files for committing the queries used during analysis
📊 Google Sheets for saving the results of queries
📝 Markdown file for publishing content and managing public metadata
💻 Collab notebook for collaborative coding in Python - if needed
💬 #web-almanac-media on Slack for team coordination

[MichaelLewittes]

I'd be happy to be the editor of the media section again. Know the drill -- and ready to do it once more.

[foolip]

I'm interested in contributing as an analyst.

I've been poking around at the question "what sizes and qualities do images on the web tend to be?" I've been running some of the queries in https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2022/media again and have identified what I think are a few interesting angles.

First, the distribution of images sizes is much more uneven and interesting than https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2022/media#image-dimensions suggests. Here's a histogram from a quick experiment I did in February:

Instead of megapixels I'm using sqrt(megapixels), so the equivalent width of a square image. I found this much easier to reason about, since much of the interesting action is in the 0-0.25 megapixel range. 300x300 images are the most common.

Second, BPP (bits/pixel) strongly depends on image size, with smaller images having higher BPP. The reasons I can see are (1) container overhead (2) more incentive to compress large images and (3) less detail in large images, as many small images are downscaled versions of the large ones.

I think it would be interesting to try to understand quality both through BPP while taking these effects into account, but also by estimating the encoder settings used. I suspect the latter varies less with size, and at least from JPEG an estimation is possible due to how the format works. A first attempt yielded this:

I also shared this in #3572 (comment) and there are some words of caution about using ImageMagick's detected quality, but I think something useful could be done here.

[foolip]

A colleague made this useful observation:

noting that 300x300 is the default (medium) image size in WordPress and 82 is the default quality. This lines up exactly with the "most common" size and quality. Since WordPress sites are a large part of the dataset (~30%) they may be influencing the results. It might be interesting to see what images on non WordPress sites looks like.

[svgeesus]

I noticed this in the 2022 Media report

One caveat: AVIF and PNG allow tagging images with wide-gamut color spaces using format-specific shorthands, without using ICC profiles. We started down the path of trying to detect wide-gamut AVIFs and PNGs that don’t use ICC profiles, but accounting for the various ways they are encoded—and the ways our tooling reported on them—proved a bit too complex to tackle this year. Maybe next year!

Coding Independent Code Points (CICP) is a simple to understand and use method, originally from the broadcast and video world, also applicable to still images and short animations.

Given that:

• AVIF is using (and seems to prefer) CICP rather than ICC profiles
• PNG now supports CICP (see also this explainer)
• JPEG XL supports CICP
• Chrome implements CICP in PNG and AVIF
• Firefox intends to implement CICP for PNG (they already do for AVIF)
• Safari implements CICP (but only on the most recent macOS, they depend on the platform)
• Labeling HDR images is easy with CICP and currently hard with ICC, at least with ICC.1

Then the "various ways they are encoded" becomes a much more tractable "look for CICP in images" and I suggest this metric for the 2024 Media survey.

Originally raised in

• Detecting non-ICC wide-gamut PNG images in the wild w3c/PNG-spec#211

[svgeesus]

I volunteer as tribute as a reviewer

[nucliweb]

Hi, I would love to contribute as an analyst.

[nrllh]

Hey @eeeps @akshay-ranganath @nhoizey @yoavweiss @MichaelLewittes - awesome contributors from previous years 🙂 Are you interested in joining us again this year?

[MichaelLewittes]

Would be honored to join again as the editor.

…

On Tue, Apr 9, 2024 at 6:38 PM Nurullah Demir ***@***.***> wrote: Hey @eeeps <https://github.com/eeeps> @akshay-ranganath <https://github.com/akshay-ranganath> @nhoizey <https://github.com/nhoizey> @yoavweiss <https://github.com/yoavweiss> @MichaelLewittes <https://github.com/MichaelLewittes> - awesome contributors from previous years 🙂 Are you interested in joining us again this year? — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#3596 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AW6KSXJHEQFVMNCEFMKQCPLY4RUXTAVCNFSM6AAAAABEDJBJZ6VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMZDANBWGE2TGNJTGE> . You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[nhoizey]

Hi @nrllh, I can indeed join this year once again, as a reviewer.

[eeeps]

@nrllh I can join as an Analyst and Reviewer, but do not have the bandwidth to Lead or Author again this year.

[nrllh]

thank you, @MichaelLewittes, @nhoizey, @eeeps!

[turban1988]

Hi @rey-dal,
Thank you very much for volunteering to lead the writing of this chapter! Could you please organize a kick-off meeting for this chapter (example: #3603 (comment)) to organize the writing of the chapter?

Furthermore, it would be helpful if you and all other contributors (@svgeesus, @nhoizey, @eeeps , @foolip,@nucliweb,@MichaelLewittes) could join the slack channel of the HTTPArchive (https://join.slack.com/t/httparchive/shared_invite/zt-2hfkn28ts-~uXN4UGS0mXsKpzzhtZcow)

Thanks!

[scottjehl]

I'd love to see included in this year's report if there's been any uptick in responsive video usage now that support has returned across browsers. That is, how many sites are using video source elements with media attributes and what sizes are they commonly serving? Happy to help if there's any way I can!