One of the cooler and lesser known features of JPEG XL is a mode to losslessly transcode from JPEG while achieving ~20% space reduction. It’s reversible too because the original entropy coded bitstream is untouched.<p>Notably GCP is rolling this out to their DICOM store API, so you get the space savings of JXL but can transcode on the fly for applications that need to be served JPEG.<p>Only know this because we have tens of PBs in their DICOM store and stand to save a substantial amount of $ on an absurdly large annual bill.<p>Native browser support is on our wishlist and our contacts indicate the chrome team will get there eventually.
It looks very likely chromium will be using jxl-rs crate for this feature [0]. My personal suspicion is that they've just been waiting for it to good enough to integrate and they didn't want to promise anything until it was ready (hence the long silence).<p>[0] <a href="https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40168998#comment507" rel="nofollow">https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40168998#comment507</a>
That was Mozilla's stance. Google was thoroughly hostile towards it. They closed the original issue citing a lack of interest among users, despite the users themselves complaining loudly against it. The only thing I'm not sure about is why they decided to reopen it. They may have decided that they didn't need this much bad PR. Or someone inside may have been annoyed by it just as much as we are.<p>PS: I'm a bit too sleepy to search for the original discussion. Apologies for not linking it here.
> The only thing I'm not sure about is why they decided to reopen it.<p>It's almost certainly due to the PDF Association adding JPEG XL as a supported image format to the ISO standard for PDFs; considering Google's 180 on JPEG XL support came just a few days after the PDF Association's announcement.
It wasn't just a blatant lie for lack of interest, they also went out their way to benchmark it and somehow present it as inferior to AVIF.
That library had a hiatus with zero commits of over 1.5 years until recently iirc.<p>That this is working out is a combination of wishful thinking and getting lucky.
"Code frequency" for jxl-rs shows no activity from Aug 2021 to Aug 2024, then steady work with a couple of spurts. That's both a longer hiatus and a longer period of subsequent activity (a year+ ago isn't "recently" in my book.) What data have you based your observation on?
Have you seen JPEG XL source code? I like the format, but the reference implementation in C++ looked pretty bad at least 2 years ago. I hope they rewrote it, because it surely looked like a security issue waiting to happen.
That's why both Mozilla and Google have predicated their JXL support on a memory-safe implementation. There's a Rust one in the works.<p>I think Google are aiming to replace all of Chromiums decoders with memory-safe ones anyway, even for relatively simple formats.
If that's their plan, I predict another situation exactly like this one where Google decides that removing support is the best move forward. Careful, BMP, Chrome is out to get you!
BMP decoding may seem easy and fun (I wrote a toy decoder back in the day), but the vulnerabilities are real: <a href="https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-32468" rel="nofollow">https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-32468</a><p>It's not the format, it's the C / C++ unfortunate baggage.
> Have you seen JPEG XL source code? I like the format, but the reference implementation in C++ looked pretty bad at least 2 years ago. I hope they rewrote it, because it surely looked like a security issue waiting to happen.<p>At this point, in 2025, any substantial (non-degenerative) image processing written in C++ is a security issue waiting to happen. That's not specific to JPEG XL.
> any substantial (non-degenerative)<p>Why this quality poses security issues?
Well, the first public implementation dates to 2020. And, the Cpp choice is obvious, simpler integration with the majority of existing image processing libs, tools and utilities. Not to mention GUI toolkits.<p>Nonetheless, we should really bear in mind how entrenched Cpp is. If you normalize CVEs by language popularity Java looks downright dangerous!
And yet whole of HN is VERY VERY angry because Google won't ship that pile of C++ into most popular software (and app framework) in the world.
The most popular software in question is also a giant pile of C++, btw.
Mozilla's position for some time now has been, "we aren't opposed to shipping JXL support, but we'd want to ship a decent implementation in a memory safe language, not the reference C++ implementation". That position hasn't been met with very much criticism.<p>Google's position, on the other hand, has been a flat-out "no, we will not ship JXL". <i>That's</i> what has been met with criticism. Not an imagined reluctance to shipping a C++ JXL implementation.
Who is saying Google should ship the reference implementation? It's a standard, and Google has the labor to write their own implementation.
Google did write one. They wrote the bad one that we're discussing.
That sounds like an even more request for someone to do for free, doesn't it?
It's Google, it's one of the biggest tech companies in the world making boatloads of money, in part off their browser. They're currently best known as one of the companies trying to create AI God. They really can't write an... image format parser?
JXL's war is not with AVIF, which is already a de-facto standard which has near-universal browser support, is enshrined as an Apple image default, will only become more popular as AV1 video does, etc. It's not going anywhere.<p>That's not to say that JXL is bad or going away. It currently has poor browser support, but it's now finding its footing in niche use cases (archival, prosumer photography, medical), and will eventually become ubiquitous enough to just <i>be</i> what the average person refers to as "JPEG" 10 years from now.<p>To address selected claims made in the post:<p>• <i>"AVIF is 'homegrown'"</i> – AVIF is an open, royalty-free AOMedia standard developed by the Alliance for Open Media (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, Mozilla, etc.).<p>• <i>"AVIF is 'inferior'"</i> – AVIF is significantly better than JPEG/WebP in compression efficiency at comparable quality, and comparable with JXL in many scenarios.<p>• <i>"AVIF is ridiculous in this aspect, capping at 8,193×4,320."</i> — JXL's theoretical maximum image size is bigger. The author cites AVIF's Baseline profile (think embedded devices), but AVIF supports 16,384×8,704 per tile. It HEIF container format supports a grid of up to 65,535 tiles (so logical images sizes up to 1,073,725,440 wide <i>or</i> 283,111,200 tall).<p>So, JPEG XL is good. Yes, it's far behind AVIF in terms of adoption and ecosystem, but that will improve. AVIF is likely to erase any current JXL quality advantages with AV2, but both JXL and AV1/AV2 encoders will get better with time, so they're likely to be neck-and-neck in quality for the foreseeable future.
> JXL's theoretical maximum image size is bigger.<p>This is all fine and good until you actually try encoding such an image with libjxl. What an absolute garbage codebase. I'm sure it's gotten better since I've last used it, but it's impressive how unoptimized, memory hungry, and of course wildly unsafe/crashy it was. Many of the options just completely didn't work, either due to exponential performance, crashes, or weird special-casing that breaks the moment you encode anything that's dissimilar from the sample images used in the sham benchmark made by the libjxl creators. I don't even think a high resolution image had ever been successfully encoded on higher effort levels, since I doubt that anyone trying to do so had the terabytes of RAM required.<p>I was genuinely flabbergasted when there was mass support for reviving it a couple years ago. I don't think anyone advocating for it has actually used libjxl at all and were just internet hypemen. That seems to happen all too often nowadays.<p>This all being said, I'm mildly optimistic for a retry with jxl-rs. However, seeing much of the same contributors from libjxl on jxl-rs does make me quite cautious.
I seem to recall that a large part of the stated rationale at the time the Chrome Team decided to deprecate support for JXL was that they had support for both AVIF and JXL, and AVIF was good enough.<p>This might be the origin of the "competition" in the context of this Google decision/reversal.
A full-resolution, maximum-size JPEG XL image (1,073,741,823 × 1,073,741,824):<p>Uncompressed: 3.5–7 exabytes
Realistically compressed: Tens to hundreds of petabytes<p>Thats a serious high-res image
At 600DPI that's over a marathon in each dimension.<p>I do wonder if there are any DOS vectors that need to be considered if such a large image can be defined in relatively small byte space.<p>I was going to work out how many A4 pages that was to print, but google's magic calculator that worked really well has been replaced by Gemini which produces this trash:<p><pre><code> Number of A4 pages=0.0625 square meters per A4 page * 784 square miles =13,200 A4 pages.
</code></pre>
No Gemini, you can't equate meters and miles, even if they do both abbreviate to 'm' sometimes.
> I do wonder if there are any DOS vectors that need to be considered if such a large image can be defined in relatively small byte space.<p>You can already DOS with SVG images. Usually, the browser tab crashes before worse things happen. Most sites therefore do not allow SVG uploads, except GitHub for some reason.
"Google's magic calculator" was probably just a wrapper to GNU Units [0], which produces:<p><pre><code> $ units
You have: (1073741823/(600/inch))**2 / A4paper
You want:
Definition: 3.312752e+10
</code></pre>
Equivalent tools: Qalc, Numbat<p>0: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36994418">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36994418</a>
Wolfram alpha is the better calculator for that sort of thing.
The only practical way to work with such large images is if they are tiled and pyramidal anyway
Which JXL supports, by the way. Tiling is mandatory for images bigger than 2048x2048, and you can construct images based on an 8x downscaled version, recursing that up to 4 times for up to 4096x downscaling.
what does pyramidal mean in this context?
Probably, multiple resolutions of the same thing. E.g. a lower res image of the entire scene and then higher resolution versions of sections. As you zoom in, the higher resolution versions get used so that you can see more detail while limiting memory consumption.
JPEG and friends transforms the image data into the frequency domain. Regular old JPEG uses the discrete cosine transformation[1] for this on 8x8 blocks of pixels. This is why with heavily compressed JPEG images you can see blocky artifacts[2]. JPEG XL uses variable block size DCT.<p>Lets stick to old JPEG as it's easier to explain. The DCT takes the 8x8 pixels of a block and transforms it to 8x8 magnitudes of different frequency components. In one corner you have the DC component, ie zero frequency, which represents the average of all 8x8 pixels. Around it you have the lowest non-zero frequency components. You have three of those, one which has a non-zero x frequency, one with a non-zero y frequency, and one where both x and y are non-zero. The elements next to those are the next-higher frequency components.<p>To reconstruct the 8x8 pixels, you run the inverse discrete cosine transformation, which is lossless (to within rounding errors).<p>However, due to Nyquist[3], you don't need those higher-frequency components if you want a lower-resolution image. So if you instead strip away the highest-frequency components so you're left with a 7x7 block, you can run the inverse transform on that to get a 7x7 block of pixels which perfectly represents a 7/8 = 87.5% sized version of the original 8x8 block. And you can do this for each block in the image to get a 87.5% sized image.<p>Now, the pyramidal scheme takes advantage of this by rearranging how the elements in each transformed block is stored. First it stores the DC components of all the blocks the image. If you just used those, you'd get an image which perfectly represents a 1/8th-sized image.<p>Next it stores all the lowest-frequency components for all the blocks. Using the DC and those you have effectively 2x2 blocks, and can perfectly reconstruct a quarter-sized image.<p>Now, if the decoder knows the target size the image will be displayed at, it can then just stop reading when it has sufficiently large blocks to reconstruct the image near the target size.<p>Note that most good old JPEG decoders supports this already, however since the blocks are stored one after another it still requires reading the entire file from disk. If you have a fast disk and not too large images it can often be a win regardless. But if you have huge images which are often not used in their full resolution, then the pyramidal scheme is better.<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_cosine_transform" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_cosine_transform</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://eyy.co/tools/artifact-generator/" rel="nofollow">https://eyy.co/tools/artifact-generator/</a> (artifact intensity 80 or above)<p>[3]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...</a>
I think it means encoded in such a way that you first have low res version, then higher res versions, then even higher res versions etc.
Replicated at different resolutions depending on your zoom level.<p>One patch at low resolution is backed by four higher-resolution images, each of which is backed by four higher-resolution images, and so on... All on top of an index to fetch the right images for your zoom level and camera position.
Tiled at different zoom levels
We call those mipmaps.
A selfie at that resolution would be some sort of super-resolution microscopy.
An image of earth at very roughly 4cmx4cm resolution? (If I've knocked the zero's off correctly)
Yes, but unlike AVIF, JPEG XL supports progressive decoding, so you can see the picture in lower quality long before the download has finished. (Ordinary JPEG also supports progressive decoding, but in a much less efficient manner, which means you have to wait longer for previews with lower quality.)
[flagged]
Prior HN posts/discussions:<p>Chromium Team Re-Opens JPEG XL Feature Ticket
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46018994">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46018994</a><p>FSF Slams Google over Dropping JPEG-XL in Chrome <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35589179">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35589179</a><p>Google set to deprecate JPEG XL support in Chrome 110 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33399940">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33399940</a><p>Chromium jpegxl issue closed as won't fix
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40407475">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40407475</a>
Lots more at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36214955">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36214955</a> and the links back from there, and I'm sure there are others between then and now. Too many to list!
[dupe]<p>Main recent discussion:<p><i>Google Revisits JPEG XL in Chromium After Earlier Removal</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46021179">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46021179</a>
"in favor of the homegrown and inferior AVIF"<p>I am using .avif since some years; all my old .jpg
and .png files have been pretty much replaced by
.avif, in particular fotos. I am not saying .avif is
perfect, but IMO it is much better than .jpg or
.avif.<p>I could have gone .webp or perhaps jpeg-xl but at the
end of the day, I am quite happy with .avif as it is.<p>As for JPEG XL - I think the problem here is ... Google.
Google dictates de-facto web-standards onto us. This is
really bad. I don't want a commercial entity control my
digital life.
> I am not saying .avif is perfect, but IMO it is much better than .jpg or .avif<p>going crazy reading this sentence
For making compact high-quality jpeg files, consider trying jpegli[1], it does an impressive job.<p>More specifically, if I try a bunch of AVIF quantization options and manually pick the one that appears visually lossless, it beats jpegli, but if I select a quantization option that always looks visually lossless with AVIF, jpegli will win the average size, because I need to use some headroom for images that AVIF does less well on.<p>1: <a href="https://github.com/google/jpegli" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/google/jpegli</a>
no one asked, but FYI in English it is more commmon to say "for several years" instead of "since some years" :)
Quick reminder that it's not "Google" that killed JXL before, it was the Chrome team. Jpeg XL was designed by a Google engineer (JyrkiAlakuijala here) who is not part of the Chrome team, but in Google Research in the Zurich office while the Chrome team, although it has offices all around the world, at its core is very insular and lives in the Mountain View bubble.
Jyrki is highly talented. Also the author of the incredible Jpegli, which seemed to be a reaction to Google deep-sixing JpegXL, and also Brotli, WebP lossless and WOFF2 among other things.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law</a>
A little bit related: RAW files from iPhone 17 Pro are compressed using JPEG-XL.
Isn't this due to the 100M+ line C++ multi-threaded dependency being a potential nightmare when you are dealing with images in browsers/emails/etc. as an attack surface?<p>I think both Mozilla and Google are OK with this - if it is written in Rust in order to avoid that situation.<p>I know the linked post mentions this but isn't that the crux of the whole thing? The standard itself is clearly an improvement over what we've had since forever.
100M+ is a bit more than i would expect for an image format. have i not been paying attention
According to tokei, the lib/ directory from the reference implementation [0] has 93821 lines of C++ code and 22164 lines of "C Header" (which seems to be a mix of C++ headers, C headers, and headers that are compatible with both C and C++). The tools/ directory adds 16314 lines of C++ code and 1952 lines of "C Header".<p>So at least if GP was talking about libjxl "100K+" would be more accurate.<p>[0]: <a href="https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl</a>
One of the best ways to measure code complexity is to zip up the source code. This eliminates a lot of the redundancies and is a more direct measure of entropy/complexity than almost anything else.<p>By that metric, jpeg-xl is about 4x the size of the jpeg or png codebase.
Interesting approach
It comes from the "intelligence is a form of compression" hypothesis that has been floating around in the ML space. Also, with a good compression algorithm it is a fairly direct measure of entropy, which is quite well correlated with what a developer might consider code size and/or complexity.
>> 100M+ is a bit more than i would expect for an image format. have i not been paying attention<p>> So at least if GP was talking about libjxl "100K+" would be more accurate.<p>M can mean thousands and I think it's common to use it used that way in finance and finance-adjacent areas: <a href="https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Abbreviations/faq0094.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/A...</a>:<p>> A. You’ve identified two commonly used conventions in finance, one derived from Greek and the other from Latin, but neither one is standard.<p>Starting with the second convention, M is used for amounts in the thousands and MM for amounts in the millions (usually without a space between the number and the abbreviation—e.g., $150M for $150,000 and $150MM for $150 million). This convention overlaps with the conventions for writing roman numerals, according to which a thousand is represented by M (from mille, the Latin word for “thousand”). Any similarity with roman numerals ends there, however, because MM in roman numerals means two thousand, not a thousand thousands, or one million, as in financial contexts...<p><a href="https://www.accountingcoach.com/blog/what-does-m-and-mm-stand-for" rel="nofollow">https://www.accountingcoach.com/blog/what-does-m-and-mm-stan...</a>:<p>> An expense of $60,000 could be written as $60M. Internet advertisers are familiar with CPM which is the cost per thousand impressions.<p>> The letter k is also used represent one thousand. For example, an annual salary of $60,000 might appear as $60k instead of $60M.
I assume this is regional... I work in accounting and finance in New Zealand (generally following ordinary Western/Commonwealth standards) and I've never heard of using M for thousands. If I used that I would confuse the hell out of everyone around me.
"It's... a regional dialect."<p>"What region?"<p>"Er, upstate New York."<p>"Really. Well, I'm from Utica and I've never heard anyone use the phrase '100M' to mean '100 thousand'"<p>"Oh, no, not in Utica. It's an Albany expression."
In some areas M is <i>mille</i> as in the Latin/French/Italian word for thousand, e.g.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_mille" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_per_mille</a>
Okay, but this is... not finance? And the article itself wrote 100K. Rewriting that as 100M does nobody a favor.
I don't think many (if any) programmers would imagine 100M lines of code to mean 100,000 lines of code and not 1,000,000...
Technically right is the worst kind of right
The article says 100K, not 100M. I'm guessing that's what the parent comment meant.<p>100MLOC for an image format would be bananas. You could fit the entire codebases of a couple of modern operating systems, a handful of AAA videogames, and still have room for several web apps and command line utilities in 100MLOC.
It's a container format that does about a bajillion things - lossy, lossless, multiple modes optimized for different image types (photography vs digital design), modern encode/decode algorithms, perceptual color space, adaptive quantization, efficient ultra-high-resolution decoding and display, partial and complete animation, tile handling, everything JPEG does, and a bunch more.
They wanted to say 100K instead of 100M
You mean 100K+? A large chunk of which they say is testing code?
This is some strange misinformation.<p>The C++ JPEG XL decoder is ~30'000 lines, i.e., 3000x smaller than you claim. A non-multithreaded, non-simdified code would be much simpler, around 8000 to 10000 lines of code.<p>It is not difficult to measure from the repository. The compiled compressed binary for an APK is 5x smaller than that of full AVIF. The complete specification at under 100 pages is ~13x more compact than that of full AVIF.
>The compiled compressed binary for an APK<p>This doesn't undermine your argument at all, but we should not be compressing native libs in APKs.<p><a href="https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/application-element#extractNativeLibs" rel="nofollow">https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/applicat...</a>
-> They were concerned about the increased attack surface resulting from including the current 100K+ lines C++ libjxl reference decoder, even though most of those lines are testing code.<p>Seems like Google has created a memory-safe decoder for it in Rust or something.
Google is one of the parties involved in the creating of jxl. If it's their own fault they didn't write a decoder in a memory safe language sooner.
libjxl is is <112,888 lines of code, about 3 orders of magnitude less than you're 100M+ claim.
because memory safety is the only attack vector, as we all know
> ...but now in le Rust!!1<p>I look forward to the next generation of rubes rewriting this all in some newer ""safe"" language in three decades.
> I think both Mozilla and Google are OK with this - if it is written in Rust in order to avoid that situation.<p>It would need to be written in the <i>Safe Rust</i> subset to give safety assurances. It's an important distinction.
99% safe with 1% unsafe mixed in is far, far better than 100k loc of c++ -- look at Google's experience with rust in Android. It's not perfect and they had one "almost vulnerability" but the rate of vulnerabilities is much, much lower even with a bit of unsafe mixed in.
Agreed, and Google developers can probably be trusted to 'act responsibly', but too often people forget the distinction. Some Rust codebases are wildly unsafe, and too often people see <i>written in Rust</i> and falsely conclude it's a memory-safe codebase.
Starting to feel like this whole "standards" thing is a giant farce
Well, there are <i>de jure</i> standards (what the w3c says a browser should do) and <i>de facto</i> standards (what Chrome does).
Which standard requires support of JXL?
Obligatory xkcd: <a href="https://xkcd.com/927" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/927</a>
> Yes, right, “not enough interest from the entire ecosystem”. Sure.<p>Well tbf, the only time I ever hear about JPEG XL is when people complain about Chrome not having it. I think that might be its only actual use case.
The biggest "win" for JPEG XL so far was last year's adoption by Apple for ProRAW, and prosumer photography is will likely be JPEG XL's primary mainstream use case. Pros will continue to shoot in "actual RAW", and consumers will (and this is not an insult) continue to have no interest in the technical details of the compressed media formats being used.<p><a href="https://petapixel.com/2024/09/18/why-apple-uses-jpeg-xl-in-the-iphone-16-and-what-it-means-for-your-photos/" rel="nofollow">https://petapixel.com/2024/09/18/why-apple-uses-jpeg-xl-in-t...</a>
Good, but mass adoption is a lot slower in sites than in browsers it seems. It's like pulling teeth making sites to actually support even AVIF which is already widely supported in browsers. A ton of inertia even on sites like GitHub and GitLab. Try using AVIF on Wikipedia? Tough luck.<p>Imagine how long it will take for JPEG XL that didn't even reach wide browsers support yet.<p>Side note - comparing JPEG XL and AVIF features wise is sort of pointless if AVIF will continue to evolve based on AV2 and etc.
There’s also the issue of non-browser support. I recently advocated for replacing some GIFs with WEBM because WEBM was faster to encode and took up 3% as much space. Technically it sounded great. Then we talked to users.<p>It turns out some users wanted to embed moving pictures in Word documents, which you can only do with a GIF because it’s an image format that happens to move, so Word treats it as an image (by rendering it to the page). If it’s a video format, Word treats it as an attachment that you have to click on so it’ll open Media Player and show you.
Cool, that means it'll appear in ebook reading systems in five to ten years.
It'll be in PDF sooner, and my experience is that PDF >> any other system for ebooks. I liked the <i>idea</i> of EPUB but when I recently installed an EPUB reader to read some files I was shocked at how awful it looked whereas for 15 years I've been reading PDF files on tablets with relish.
Have you ever tried reading a PDF ebook on a phone? Small font size, doesn't fill the entire screen (phones are taller), margins make it appear even smaller... even if you have good eyesight it's a pain. The whole point of PDF is to preserve a page layout as authored. EPUB is meant to adapt to your device.
>and my experience is that PDF >> any other system for ebooks.<p>Are you speaking just about technical books?<p>Because I can’t imagine anyone trying to read a novel in epub vs pdf on a phone or epub reader and going with the latter.
The worst epubs are bad because some jackass took some poorly OCRed text and dumped it into the format. The best (retail) epubs are on par with the best PDFs except you don't have to pan-and-scan to read a fucking page. It just reflows.<p>For novels I want and prefer epubs, but also non-novels if they were released in the last 5 years or so. PDF isn't magic, and there are bad pdfs out there too, scans of photo-copied books and other nonsense.
There is a mode for PDF files that reflows and is logically similar to EPUB in that there is an HTML-derived data model and you have images embedded in the PDF much as they are embedded in the EPUB. Of course if you hate how complex PDF is it is more to hate.
I oversee ebook production for a uni press so I am familiar with how the proverbial sausage is made. Which is why I still mainly prefer print books.
That's interesting, I absolutely hate PDF. Lack of metadata for collecting, format is difficult to support, doesn't layout well on mobile, and very limited customization (like dark mode, changing text size, etc).<p>Only benefit is browsers have built-in support for the format.
One thing I like about PDF is the annotations (notes & highlights) are embedded in the PDF itself. That is not the case for EPUB files, each EPUB reader stores annotations in its own proprietary format.
> Lack of metadata for collecting<p>PDFs have pretty excellent support for metadata. If the collection software doesn't support at least Dublin Core, that may be kind of their own fault...
That seems optimistic...
Compressing image files from 100k+ lines of C++ in libjxl repository, which contains JPEG XL reference implementation.<p>Encoding and decoding JPEG XL file is: #djxl input.jxl output.png.
AV2 is in the works, so I guess we'll have AVIF2 soon, and another AVIF2 vs JPEG XL battle.
Do we now need <a href="https://unkilledbygoogle.com" rel="nofollow">https://unkilledbygoogle.com</a>?
I believe the appropriate term is ununaliving. Please communicate with care.
Great now unkill xhtml/xml+xstl
[dead]
As a monopoly, Google should be barred from having standards positions and be legally required to build and support the web standards as determined by other parties.<p>The insanity that the web platform is just "whatever Google's whims are" remains insane and mercurial. The web platform should not be as inconsistent as Google's own product strategies, wonder if XSLT will get unkilled in a few months.
Having key browser implementers not involved in the standards processes is what lead us to the W3C wasting several years chasing XHTML 2.0.
I kind of liked xhtml, though clearly it was not necessary for the web to be successful. I think the bigger issue is that W3C pursued this to the detriment of more important investments.<p>Reading over the minutes for the last W3C WG session before WHATWG was announced, the end result seems obvious. The eventual WHATWG folks were pushing for investment in web-as-an-app-platform and everyone else was focused on in retrospect very unimportant stuff.<p>“Hey, we need to be able to build applications.”<p>“Ok, but first we need <i>compound documents</i>.”<p>There was one group who thought they needed to build the web as Microsoft Word and another that wanted to create the platform on which Microsoft Word could be built.
> and another that wanted to create the platform on which Microsoft Word could be built.<p>Apparently they failed. The web version of Word is still far from having feature parity. Of course doc is one of those everything and the kitchen sink formats, so implementing it on top of a platform that was originally intended to share static documents is kind of a tall order.
There is a difference between having them "involved" and them being the only authority in the entire process.
There are other key browser implementers. Google should not have more than an advisory role in any standards organization.
Which other parties? Because Mozilla's stance on JPEG XL and XSLT are identical to Google's. They don't want to create a maintenance burden for features that offer little benefit over existing options.
Didn't Mozilla basically say they would support it if Google does? Mozilla doesn't have the resources to maintain a feature that no one can actually use; they're barely managing to keep up with the latest standards as it is.
They have many millions to spend on engineers. They should do that.
Yeah, they need those resources to pay the CEO!
> maintain a feature that no one can actually use;<p>If only there was a way to detect which features a browser supports. Something maybe in the html, the css, javascript or the user agent. If only there was a way to do that, we would not be stuck in a world pretending that everything runs on IE6. /s
><i>Because Mozilla's stance on JPEG XL and XSLT are identical to Google's.</i><p>Okay, and do they align on every other web standard too?
Which is why Firefox is steadily losing market share.<p>If Mozilla wanted Firefox to succeed, they would stop playing "copy Chrome" and support all sorts of things that the community wants, like JpegXL, XSLT, RSS/Atom, Gemini (protocol, not AI), ActivityPub, etc.<p>Not to mention a built-in ad-blocker...
With all due respect, this is a completely HN-brained take.<p>No significant number of users chooses their browser based on support for <i>image codecs</i>. Especially not when no relevant website will ever use them until Safari and Chrome support them.<p>And websites which already do not bother supporting Firefox very much will bother even less if said browser by-default refuses to allow them to make revenue. They may in fact go even further and put more effort into trying to block said users unless they use a different browser.<p>Despite whatever HN thinks, Firefox lost marketshare on the basis of:<p>A) heavy marketing campaigns by Google including backdoor auto-installations via. crapware installers like free antivirus, Java and Adobe, and targeted popups on the largest websites on the planet (which are primarily google properties). The Chrome marketing budget alone nearly surpasses Mozilla's entire budget and that's not even accounting for the value of the aforementioned self-advertising.<p>B) being a slower, heavier browser at the time, largely because the extension model that HN loved so much and fought the removal of was an architectural anchor, and beyond that, XUL/XPCOM extensions were frequently the cause of the most egregious examples of bad performance, bloat and brokenness in the first place.<p>C) being "what their cellphone uses" and Google being otherwise synonymous with the internet, like IE was in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Their competitors (Apple, Microsoft, Google) all own their own OS platforms and can squeeze alternative browsers out by merely being good enough or integrated enough not to switch for the average person.
I don't disagree with you, but given (A) how will Firefox ever compete?<p>One possible way is doing things that Google and Chrome don't (can't).<p>Catering to niche audiences (and winning those niches) gives people a reason to use it. Maybe one of the niches takes off. Catering to advanced users not necessarily a bad way to compete.<p>Being a feature-for-feature copy of Chrome is not a winning strategy (IMHO).
>Being a feature-for-feature copy of Chrome is not a winning strategy (IMHO).<p>Good thing they aren't? Firefox's detached video player feature is far superior to anything Chrome has that I'm aware of. Likewise for container tabs, Manifest V2 and anti-fingerprinting mode. And there are AI integrations that do make sense, like local-only AI translation & summaries, which could be a "niche feature" that people care about. But people complain about that stuff too.
And these aren't niche/advanced features? I'm using Firefox now, and did not know about them. If I'm using them, it is only accidentally or because they are the defaults.<p>But I'm agreeing with you! These features are important to you, an advanced user. The more advanced users for Firefox, the better.
> all sorts of things that the community wants, like JpegXL, XSLT, RSS/Atom, Gemini (protocol, not AI), ActivityPub, etc.<p>What “community” is this? The typical consumer has no idea what any of this is.
I agree with you. But a typical consumer will already be using Chrome, and has no reason to use Firefox.<p>If one of these advanced/niche technologies takes off, suddenly they will have a reason to use Firefox.
For Firefox to win back significant share, they need to do more than embrace fringe scenarios that normal people don’t care about. They need some compelling reason to switch.<p>IE lost the lead to Firefox when IE basically just stopped development and stagnated. Firefox lost to Chrome when Firefox became too bloated and slow. Firefox simply will not win back that market until either Chrome screws up majorly or Firefox delivers some significant value that Google cannot immediately copy.
Nah, google paved the way forward with vital developments like WebGPU und import maps. I stopped using and supporting Firefox because they refused to improve the internet.
Barred by who? There is no governing body who can do such a thing, currently. As it is, nothing stops any random person or organization from creating any new format.
Nobody is stopping you from using jpegxl.
This is a vacuous statement. No one is stopping me from using JPEG XL in the same sense that no one is stopping me from using DIMG10K, a format I just invented. But if I attempt to use either of these in my website today, Chrome will not render them.<p>In a very real sense Google is currently stopping web authors from using JPEG XL.
Then what is this article about?
It's a meta-commentary about the death of critical thinking and the ease with which mindless mobs can be whipped.<p>From the jump, the article commits a logical error, suggesting that Google killed jpegxl because it favors avif, which is "homegrown". jpegxl, of course, was <i>also</i> written by Google, so this sentence isn't even internally consistent.
Well, they said they would unkill xslt if someone would rewrite and maintain it so that it's not the abandonware horrorshow it was.<p>As for JPEG XL, of course they unkilled it. WEBP has been deprecated in favor of JPEG XL.
I don’t think they actually said that about xslt at all. From what I saw they basically said usage is low enough that they do not care about it.<p>Can you point to somewhere that Google or anyone else indicated that they would support xslt once there’s a secure, supported version?
> Well, they said they would unkill xslt if someone would rewrite and maintain it so that it's not the abandonware horrorshow it was.<p>Who said this? I was never able to find any support among the browser devs for "keep XSLT with some more secure non-libxslt implementation".
Webp deprecated? According to what?
It's all arbitrary. WEBP is deprecated, just like GIF is deprecated.
VP8 is in all major browsers due to WebRTC, and webp uses little more code than the VP8 keyframe decoder, so it also has baseline support and is unlikely to be deprecated any time soon. <a href="https://caniuse.com/?search=vp8" rel="nofollow">https://caniuse.com/?search=vp8</a><p>Similarly, AVIF uses little more code than the AV1 keyframe decoder, so since every browser supports AV1, every browser also supports AVIF.
honestly hate webp so happy about this