this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
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I think this might sound like a weird thing to say, but technical superiority isn't enough to make a convincing argument for adoption. There are plenty of things that are undeniably superior but yet the case for adoption is weak, mostly because (but not solely because) it would be difficult to adopt.
As an example, the French Republican Calendar (and the reformed calendar with 13 months) are both evidently superior to the Gregorian Calendar in terms of regularity but there is no case to argue for their adoption when the Gregorian calendar works well enough.
Another example—metric time. Also proposed as part of the metric system around the same time as it was just gaining ground, 100 seconds in a minute and 100 minutes in an hour definitely makes more sense than 60, but it would be ridiculous to say that we should devote resources into switching to it.
Final example—arithmetic in a dozenal (base-twelve) system is undeniably better than in decimal, but it would definitely not be worth the hassle to switch.
For similar reasons, I don't find the case for JPEG XL compelling. Yes, it's better in every metric, but when the difference comes down to a measly one or two megabytes compared to PNG and WEBP, most people really just don't care enough. That isn't to say that I think it's worthless, and I do think there are valid use cases, but I doubt it will unseat PNG on the Internet.
I’m not under the impression it would unseat PNG anytime soon, but “we have a current standard” isn’t a good argument against it. As images get higher and higher quality, it’s going to increase the total size of images. And we are going to hit a point where it matters.
This sounds so much like the misquoted “640K ought to be enough for anybody” that I honestly can’t take it seriously. There’s a reason new algorithms, formats and hardware are developed and released, because they improve upon the previous and generally improve things.
My argument is not "we have a current standard", it's "people don't give enough of a shit to change".
People don't need to give a shit, you just need websites and servers and applications to produce and convert images to the new format and the rest will happen "by itself'
It should be pretty much invisible to the users themselvea
And I suppose sysadmins and application developers are not people?
Why would you think that sysadmins and application devs wouldn't want to use JPEG XL?
I'm a developer and I like the format
Because I am a developer and I have also been a sysadmin, and I really do not care. Yes, the format is good but I'm not particularly excited for it.
You're thinking in terms of the individual user with a handful of files.
When you look at it from a server point of view with tens of terabytes of images, or as a data center, the picture is very different.
Shaving 5 or 10% off of files is a huge deal. And that's not even taking into account the huge leap in quality.
jpeg xl lossless is around 50% smaller than pngs on average, which is a huge difference
https://siipo.la/blog/whats-the-best-lossless-image-format-comparing-png-webp-avif-and-jpeg-xl
Soo they added webp and AV1, which aren't that much better then old jpeg, especially with the modern jpeg encoder JpegLi. But JpegXL is out of the question.
Those examples all have a good reason that does not apply here. Browsers already support multiple formats and added a few in the last decade.
I use arch btw