Society doesn't need a new image format. I'd wager to say not any new multimedia format. Big corporate entites do, and have churning them out at a steady pace.
Look at poor webp - a format pushed by the largest industry players - and the abysmal everyday use it gets, and the hate it generates.
Estimates are that 95% of Internet users have a browser that supports WebP and that ~25% of the top million websites serve WebP images. I wouldn't call that abysmal.
Edit: and good luck uploading the format to the majority of webforms that aren’t faang.
In what other industry would it be considered acceptable to exclude 5% of visitors/users/clients?
That's not how it works.
The server declares what versions of media it has, and the client requests a supported media format. The same trick have been used for audio and video for ages too.
Example:
<picture>
<source srcset="a.webp" type="image/webp">
<img src="fallback.jpg">
</picture>See CSS image-set : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/image/image...
> Many […] programs […] already support the new PNG spec: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, iOS/macOS, Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, Avid Media Composer...
> Plus, you saw some broadcast companies in that list above. Behind the scenes, hardware and tooling are being updated to support the new PNG spec.
But even beyond that, most file formats have a bit of a header at the start of the file that declares the actual format of the file. Browsers already can understand that and use the correct render for a file without an extension.
Note that I'm looking at "all tracked," which excludes 2% "other" browsers in the data whose featureset is not known.
e.g. cars - not everyone is physically able to drive books - blind people can't read music - deaf people can't hear
It is a form of 80/20 or 90/10 rule the last small percentage costs as much as the majority.
One example is Sony's SRF camera raw format.
Programs like Photoshop and Affinity have to bring their own decoders where previously none were required.
Having ask that in a slightly confrontational way, one of the reasons I started using VLC all those years ago, and still use it to this day, was having trouble with other media players that relied on OS support fail to work well (or at all) with some codecs, while VLC brought support for them, and their dog, built-in and reliable. Dragging your own format support libraries with you can be beneficial.
Whilst we're at it, please get rid of RGB and make it N channels too.
Libraries can choose to render that into a 3 channel, 8 bit buffer for legacy applications - but the data will be there for CMYK or HDR, or depth maps, or transparency, or focus stacking, or any other future feature!
They say it's technically compatible since older image decoders should recognize the PNG file is using a different compression algorithm than the default.
> Many programs already support the new PNG spec: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, iOS/macOS, Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, Avid Media Composer...
This is intentionally ignoring the fact that there are countless PNG decoders out in the wild, many using libpng the standard decoder last updated 6 years ago; and they will not be able to read the new PNG v2 files.
They should have used a different file extension, PNG2, to distinguish this incompatible format. Otherwise, users will be confused why their newly saved PNG file cannot be read by certain existing programs.
Rational, or economical? I find it rational to help someone in need since I'd want others to do the same to me, even if it's not financially profitable for me. Imo more factors flow into what's rational, but I understand what you mean by corporate greed working this way (less than 10% of people are blind, neither male nor female, run a free operating system or can't afford a new computer, etc., so yep they're not profitable groups and for-profits don't optimise for that)
Images are often at different resolutions too, that way, depending on the pixel density of the device, and the physical size, the browser can select the photo that has high enough resolution, but not one that is needlessly large, while also selecting the preferred image format.
Interns won't want to work on a dead end like this. Moreso they need to be supervised by someone that doesn't want to get removed by being the lowest X% usefulness in a company. So all these existing tools that aren't primary revenue generators just sit on coast mode.
There are so many uneven areas of Reddit where WebP doesn't work. Old reddit, profile support, mod tools, etc.
Photoshop still won’t open it, MacOS preview opens it but then demands to convert it to tiff when you try to edit it
If a corporation has determined that profit maximization is their core tenet, excluding the needs of a minority of users can likely be deduced in a rational manner from that tenet. That is precisely why values need to be forced onto corporate actors through regulation, e.g. in this case through mandatory accessibility guidelines like EU directive 2019/882 that enters into force this very week.
To start, there's a byte with the upper bit set which ensures an "8-bit clean" transport. If it's stripped, it becomes a harmless tab. Then the literal "PNG" text so you can see it in a text editor. Then a CR-LF pair to check for CR-LF to LF translations. Then, a CTRL-Z to stop display on DOS-like systems. And finally, another LF to check for LF to CR-LF translations.
It's a clever "magic" that basically ensures a binary transport layer. Things that mattered back in 1996.
https://www.libpng.org/pub/png/spec/1.2/PNG-Rationale.html#R...
What about it?
"Lossless WebP is typically 26% smaller than PNG, while lossy WebP can be 25-34% smaller than JPEG at equivalent quality levels"
This literally saves houndred of thousand of cost, bandwith, electricity every month on the internet. In fact, I strongly belive that this is one of the greatest contributions from Google to society just like ZSTD from Facebook.
We need good video formats however. Video makes up most of the global internet traffic, probably accounts for a good part of global storage capacity too. Even slightly better compression will have a massive impact.
Let’s also not forget the dependency mess that leaves in applications before we do though..
"WebP is used by 16.7% of all websites. This means that while it's a popular image format, it's not yet the dominant format, with JPEG still holding the majority share at 73.0%, according to W3Techs. However, WebP offers significant advantages in terms of compression and file size, making it a preferred choice for many web developers. "
(Also, the parent comment's example is also not so good because as someone else pointed just because the top 25% websites are serving webp it does mean they're not serving alternative formats for those who does not support it, as this is quite trivial to setup)
We used to do this with JPEG, in fact. And that's why many pictures on Facebook from pre-2018 or so all have a distinctive grainy look. It's artifacts on top of artifacts. Storage on phones isn't tight anymore, we don't need to store photos in a format meant to minimize bytes at the expense of quality.
There's a PR for APNG: https://github.com/pnggroup/libpng/pull/706 – it seems there was some work for HDR in e.g. https://github.com/pnggroup/libpng/pull/635 as well. Related: https://github.com/pnggroup/libpng/issues/507
Hell, for some software features (like stickers in some chat apps), WebP is mandatory.
HEIFF files, on the other hand...
We jumped through quite a lot of hoops to make sure old software will be able to display new images. They simply won't display them optimally. But for the most part, that would be because the old software wouldn't display images optimally anyway. So the limit was the software, not the format.
What I mean by this is old software that treats everything as sRGB wouldn't correctly show a Display P3 image anyway. But we made sure it will still display the image as correctly as it could.
https://www.libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html
Looks like this is the proper location for the project.
Or Linux users? Or even Firefox users in our market?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Better image formats serve entities who store images at scale, not end users.
Will say though that it's not universal, it depends heavily on the corner of the internet you're on.
