Post

thinking about image formats again, after reading two blog posts extolling the technical virtues of AVIF over JXL i think what's mostly rattling around in my head is that until today i don't think i've ever knowingly seen an AVIF in the wild

discord and bluesky use WebP. twitter still uses JPEG! who is actually using AVIF? i have no idea. and the Big Three have supported it for five years i'm not sure i've ever even seen anyone complain about it the way people do with WebP. it may as well not exist

WebP is entrenched but it has not exactly won hearts and minds. average people mostly seem to resent encountering it there is some excitement for JXL (somehow), but i wonder what it would look like for JXL to actually "win"

it would need support in a long tail of applications and web things that accept images, which is an uphill battle given that even WebP has yet to achieve that is there a world where artists export their work as JXL instead of PNG i wonder

0 reposts12 likes

also i think a sticking point is that for ages we had "PNG is lossless, JPEG is lossy", but now we have all these formats that can do both and you lose some amount of signalled intention. and that's a shame idk. i wonder what will happen

also for the record i already have jxl support in dolphin (file browser), gimp, krita, and imagemagick. i guess it's not in aseprite but otherwise that's pretty solid

I would imagine Imagemagick being among the first to support any given image format with GIMP not far behind (assuming they don't both get the support from some third library simultaneously)