4 ms·

Agreed, PNG and JPEG already serve most purposes. JPEG = I want to see the content in the image but don't care too much about the quality PNG = I want a lossl

• exmadscientist 4y ago
  It's not just that. There are purposes that require JPEG and so if I get a WEBP or AVIF or JXL I am actively angry. I was trying to set the desktop background image on a project laptop last week. I found an image I liked, that would immediately remind me what machine this was when I look at it. It was an AVIF. Windows 10 won't accept those as desktop backgrounds. It looked, for all intents and purposes, like the search image results were going to give me JPEGs -- the URL ended in .JPG and had "jpeg" as the media type! -- but that is not what I got. This did not work. Refusing to give up, I eventually determined that using curl to retrieve the image gave me a usable JPEG, and so I got my background and now I can tell this stupid project laptop apart. For my use cases, which is as someone who does light work with images (backgrounds, occasional use in some kind of paint program, occasional insertion into documents or slides), anything that isn't a JPEG or PNG is actively harmful. Not everyone uses images the way I do, but developers need to remember that not everyone is a passive sheep who just stares at things or a power-developer who builds JPEG-XL from source in their sleep. There are people in between, and we don't take kindly to being forgotten.
  • jemmyw 4y ago
    We shouldn't use a new format because some website sent you the wrong mime type and you don't know how to use an image converter? By that logic we should still be using .bmp files for all images.
    • selcuka 4y ago
      I believe the main point is that Windows doesn't support AVIF desktop backgrounds, which is annoying. PNG and JPG (and possibly GIF) are common denominators for a vast majority of systems and applications.
      • exmadscientist 4y ago
        The main point is that nothing supports AVIF other than browsers, and one or two image manipulation programs. If I have to open up GIMP every time I want to insert an image into a document, we have lost.
        • pasabagi 4y ago
          $ convert yourfile.avif yourfile.jpg
          • exmadscientist 4y ago
            How much time does that waste, every single time I have to interact with these? How much quality does it lose? Face it, these "modern" image formats are a massive annoyance for everyone except Web engineers.
            • pasabagi 4y ago
              ... so different formats exist because people want different things out of images, for instance for print, or for web, or for editing, and because all compression algorithms have their own tradeoffs. That's not a web engineer thing. I can't really imagine a world where you don't have to choose what format files should be in, and I can't really imagine a more easy way to do that conversion.
            • jemmyw 4y ago
              I don't know that much about the subject but I had an image for a website I was optimising and the avif version was 10x smaller than the png version, even after I'd run through the normal techniques to squeeze it down, and 3x smaller than the jpeg while still looking much better. That's a really significant saving. Making an image your wallpaper isn't something people do every day, going through an extra step is hardly onerous. And support will increase until it no longer matters.
        • sroussey 4y ago
          Every apple device supports AVIF natively and by default.