A new PNG spec

It seems like this new PNG spec just cements what exists already, great! The best codecs are the ones that work on everything. PNG and JPEG work everywhere, reliably.

Try opening a HEIC or AV1 or something on a machine that doesn't natively support it down to the OS-level, and you're in for a bad time. This stuff needs to work everywhere—in every app, in the OS shell for quick-looking at files, in APIs, on Linux, etc. If a codec does not function at that level, it is not functional for wider use and should not be a default for any platform.

This new spec will make PNG even worse than HEIC or AV1 - you won’t know what codec is actually inside the PNG until you open it.

I work with a LOT of images in a lot of image formats, many including extremely niche formats used in specific fields. There is a massive challenge in really supporting all of these, especially when you get down to the fact that some specs are a little looser than others. Even libraries can be very rough, since sure it says on the tin it supports JPG and TIF and HEIC... but does it support a 30GB Jpeg? Does it support all possibly meta data in the file?

> you won’t know what codec is actually inside the PNG until you open it.

But this is a feature. Think about all those exploits made possible by this feature. Sincerely, the CIA, the MI-6, the FSB, the Mossad, etc.

The more practical concern is that like AVI you can’t tell if you can read it until you try, which makes it a nightmare especially with codec rot.