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.
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.
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
https://www.libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html
Looks like this is the proper location for the project.