> Jpeg XL is not a Google thing, and neither is HEIC an Apple thing...<snip>...Employees as well as other contributors put forward to the JPEG committee.

"Technically open" doesn't help much if each of those formats is primarily pushed by one mega-corp, optimised for their specific use-case, and no industry-wide effort materialises to establish widespread interoperability.

Just last week I tried to convert raw photos to HEIF images on Windows so I could share my images in maximum quality with a bunch of iPhone users. It's basically impossible. The only tool I found was Gimp, but it doesn't properly understand colour spaces and the output looked totally wrong. I'd need OSX or IOS to author files in this format, making HEIC an "Apple thing" for all practical purposes.

It's a safe bet that Google will embed JPEG XL support in Chromium, right? Will I be able to email a .JXL file to an IOS user? Will a Windows PC user with Outlook on their desktop be able to see the image embedded in their email without having to save it and open it again in Chrome? Can I paste a .JXL image into a Word document and have its various features be correctly preserved, or will this be restricted to Google Docs viewed exclusively via Chrome?

Look, here's the thing: All of these post-JPEG formats are nice and all, but are worthless to me and a billion other people unless there's proper effort put into mass adoption. Real industry-wide cooperation, not just token openness.

As I said, it is 2020, and nobody has a viable option for distributing still images in anything other than a handful of 20-30 year old formats.

> The problem is Jpeg XL doesn't do so well in small image size as compared to HEIF or AVIF.

So then why isn't NetFlix working with the JPEG XL group to add the AV1 codec as one of the encoding options? Why are they instead creating yet another standard with no adoption likely outside of their walled garden?

Conversely, why are all the post-JPEG formats such utter failures? Take a look at the list: https://jpeg.org/jpeg/index.html

JPEG - The "popular one"
JPEG XT - Never heard of it
JPEG-LS - Never heard of it
JPEG 2000 - Heard of it, never used it
JPEG XR - Never heard of it
AIC - Heard of it, never used it
JPEG Systems - Never heard of it
JPEG XS - Never heard of it
JPEG Pleno - Never heard of it
JPEG XL - Not yet useful, will likely never use it

Clearly, whatever they JPEG group is doing, it's not working. They got lucky once, and in the 27 years since have failed to reproduce that success.

This is the core point of what I'm saying: The reason that GIF, PNG, and JPG got widespread support has more to do with luck rather than the standardisation approach. The laundry list of failures and the sad current state are evidence that luck is not a strategy and something different must be tried.

I put this in the same category of failure as IPv6. The IETF got lucky with IPv4 and figured that "more of the same" will work. They didn't get lucky the second time.

I wish I had the "political clout" to bang some heads together at these megacorps, make them sit down together and fix this.

Realistically, I foresee another decade of 8-bit, SDR, sRGB images stretched incorrectly to whatever random gamut the $150 monitor of the recipient is capable of displaying.