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And you could save even more bandwidth if you changed the PNG standard to also allow Brotli compression. Even more probably if you created a better file format.

And you could save even more bandwidth if you changed the PNG standard to also allow Brotli compression. Even more probably if you created a better file format. That's not free anymore, but it's technologically easily possible to drastically reduce the amount of resources we use. What holds us back is that it's hard to get other people to do stuff like supporting new file formats or even have a better output in their image manipulation program.

eridius 11y ago
If you change the PNG standard, it's no longer PNG. If existing PNG decoders can't decode it, then all you've done is invented a new format that looks very similar to PNG.
- legulere 11y ago
  Something similar was made with WOFF. Version 1 used deflate, version 2 uses brotli. You could now argue semantics wether WOFF2 still is WOFF, but that doesn't matter at all. The point I wanted to get across here is that it's a relatively easy change
  - viraptor 11y ago
    We can't even use jpg2000 everywhere yet. Maybe in another 15 years we can upgrade png...
    - laarc 11y ago
      jpg2000 is unfortunately encumbered by patents. I was going to use it for a certain project a long time ago, but had to abandon the idea due to that. It's a shame, because many of the ideas in jpg2000 are very valuable for the world.
      - Houshalter 11y ago
        Some of these compression patents are expiring now. I don't know if they were ever enforced to begin with. The wikipedia page is confusing, but suggests that the JPEG committee got the relevant patent holders to agree to let the patents be used freely.
  - eridius 11y ago
    > You could now argue semantics wether WOFF2 still is WOFF No arguing needed. It's a different format. It uses a different extension ("woff2" instead of "woff"), a different magic number, a different Universal Type Identifier string, and a different @font-face format. > it's a relatively easy change But it's not. Even WOFF2 isn't supported everywhere (according to http://caniuse.com/#feat=woff2 http://caniuse.com/#feat=woff2). And that's a format that's fairly recent (the W3C Recommendation doc for WOFF 1.0 is dated December 2012) and only has a handful of implementations to begin with. PNG is a format that's a lot older and is decodable by practically everyone. Even if there's only a handful of distinct implementations (and I don't actually know how many implementations there are), and even if every single implementation updated immediately, it would still take an incredibly long time for it to get deployed widely-enough to actually use as a general-purpose format. It's also worth pointing out that web fonts have built-in fallback behavior (e.g. if a browser can't handle a WOFF2 font, you can provide a WOFF font as a backup), and they're also things that are typically set up once (so generating multiple font formats is reasonable). Images don't really have fallback behavior. On the web, the WHATWG HTML Living Standard defines a <picture> element that provides fallback but it's not supported everywhere. Outside of the web there's typically no way to do fallback either (if your browser can render an image but nothing else can, saving that image to disk isn't very useful, and sending it to someone else isn't very useful either). Also, while font files are created very rarely, images are created very frequently, and most people aren't going to want to create "PNG2" images if they also have to create PNGs and deal with fallback (just look at WebP, which was released 5 years ago and still AFAIK is not used by very many people outside of Google).
    - legulere 11y ago
      Technologically it's relatively easy: just link the brotli library and call its decoding functions instead of zlibs when you encounter a file with brotli compression. It's getting everyone to implement that which is hard. This is already what I wrote in my first post.
      - eridius 11y ago
        The "getting everyone to implement that" part is the part which actually makes it a format.
duskwuff 11y ago
From what I recall, Brotli is tuned pretty heavily for compressing English text and HTML. It's got a huge built-in dictionary of common English phrases and HTML fragments. I don't think it'd perform well on image data.

eridius 11y ago

If you change the PNG standard, it's no longer PNG. If existing PNG decoders can't decode it, then all you've done is invented a new format that looks very similar to PNG.

legulere 11y ago
Something similar was made with WOFF. Version 1 used deflate, version 2 uses brotli. You could now argue semantics wether WOFF2 still is WOFF, but that doesn't matter at all. The point I wanted to get across here is that it's a relatively easy change
- viraptor 11y ago
  We can't even use jpg2000 everywhere yet. Maybe in another 15 years we can upgrade png...
  - laarc 11y ago
    jpg2000 is unfortunately encumbered by patents. I was going to use it for a certain project a long time ago, but had to abandon the idea due to that. It's a shame, because many of the ideas in jpg2000 are very valuable for the world.
    - Houshalter 11y ago
      Some of these compression patents are expiring now. I don't know if they were ever enforced to begin with. The wikipedia page is confusing, but suggests that the JPEG committee got the relevant patent holders to agree to let the patents be used freely.
- eridius 11y ago
  > You could now argue semantics wether WOFF2 still is WOFF No arguing needed. It's a different format. It uses a different extension ("woff2" instead of "woff"), a different magic number, a different Universal Type Identifier string, and a different @font-face format. > it's a relatively easy change But it's not. Even WOFF2 isn't supported everywhere (according to http://caniuse.com/#feat=woff2 http://caniuse.com/#feat=woff2). And that's a format that's fairly recent (the W3C Recommendation doc for WOFF 1.0 is dated December 2012) and only has a handful of implementations to begin with. PNG is a format that's a lot older and is decodable by practically everyone. Even if there's only a handful of distinct implementations (and I don't actually know how many implementations there are), and even if every single implementation updated immediately, it would still take an incredibly long time for it to get deployed widely-enough to actually use as a general-purpose format. It's also worth pointing out that web fonts have built-in fallback behavior (e.g. if a browser can't handle a WOFF2 font, you can provide a WOFF font as a backup), and they're also things that are typically set up once (so generating multiple font formats is reasonable). Images don't really have fallback behavior. On the web, the WHATWG HTML Living Standard defines a <picture> element that provides fallback but it's not supported everywhere. Outside of the web there's typically no way to do fallback either (if your browser can render an image but nothing else can, saving that image to disk isn't very useful, and sending it to someone else isn't very useful either). Also, while font files are created very rarely, images are created very frequently, and most people aren't going to want to create "PNG2" images if they also have to create PNGs and deal with fallback (just look at WebP, which was released 5 years ago and still AFAIK is not used by very many people outside of Google).
  - legulere 11y ago
    Technologically it's relatively easy: just link the brotli library and call its decoding functions instead of zlibs when you encounter a file with brotli compression. It's getting everyone to implement that which is hard. This is already what I wrote in my first post.
    - eridius 11y ago
      The "getting everyone to implement that" part is the part which actually makes it a format.

duskwuff 11y ago

From what I recall, Brotli is tuned pretty heavily for compressing English text and HTML. It's got a huge built-in dictionary of common English phrases and HTML fragments. I don't think it'd perform well on image data.