"For non-photographic images, the argument that “they should be vector images” doesn't hold up because many images could be vector images but aren't, and they can't be vectorized perfectly. “The world should be different” is not a justifiable defense against optimizing for the way the world actually is."
This is a good paragraph. I see people forget to apply that last sentence all the time.
Agreed. JPG is the most popular format for photography. PNG, the lossless format is great for diagrams and stuff with sharp edges. It can be "compressed" via dithering and quantization.
GIF is there... because it will always be there because it's just a hit that will never go away. It's also lossless (when discounting colour depth).
The new formats are interesting webp, avif, JXL and so on.
Jpeg classic is the clear winner IMHO and will probably never be less relevant than the new fancier formats. JPG even does text and sharp edges, reds, and so on well if you tell your process to take into account chroma subsampling!
Gif is a weird one because it's silently been replaced while keeping the name around. Virtually every software using the term "gif" actually uses a h264/vp9 video with no sound.
Modern video formats are so much better that they are a no brainer to use while the word gif just got used to refer to looping video without sound rater than the literal gif image format.
The major blunder here is browsers refusing to support silent videos in <img> tags etc. so we end up with all these hacks. Instead we got animated webp that you can't use for progressive enhancement because it doesn't have its own mime type and browsers reported support for image/webp before implementing animation support. And webp is also very limited when it comes to inter-frame compression for no good reason at all.
Gif doesn't mean "no sound" anymore. Gif is more or less "short video", which broke a lot of assumptions at first but we have pretty much passed that transition and it makes sense for what they are used for today.
Those are messaging/communication apps,sound in those apps can be quite disruptive so that doesn't surprise me at all. It has nothing to do with the original gif, it is just that gif is now synonymous with short clip (with or without sound) and sound in that context is disruptive.
Go to google.com, search for images and select image type gif and you will get mp4s with sound.
Telegram's usage of "GIF" (any short video without sound) is incredibly weird and frequently goes against users' expectations. I wouldn't treat that as definitive.
I ... what? I've never heard anyone conflate the two--not teenagers, non-technical adults, or software people. Most folks know that "GIF" means "moving image that can be easily shared but has no sound and usually crap quality", not a video/audio clip.
Reminds me of when Imgur started trying to push changing gifs over to gifv, which were just mp4 with a strange new file extension. I didn't like their approach but it really was such an improvement on file size and quality.
Not to mention if you for some odd reason wanted to do gif-style animations, you can also do it with apng or webp. You shouldn't, real video format makes more sense, but even if you did there is still no reason to use gif.
Perhaps the clue is in the past tense "supported". Nowadays browsers support many formats, but in the "olden days" gif was the only way to get animations in browsers without plugins like Macromedia Flash...
also, don't forget - actual video format is better for animated stuff. Current default approach is .webm which is standardized .mkv container + vp9 (or av1) video + opus audio (usually no audio to as a feature parity to gif). IMO animated picture formats like .avifs are very backwards and don't add much
One advantage to animated AVIF is that it supports an alpha channel, which AV1 doesn't. But I guess that just points to how short-sighted it was for AV1 to omit alpha channel support.
> Gif is a weird one because it's silently been replaced while keeping the name around. Virtually every software using the term "gif" actually uses a h264/vp9 video with no sound.
Then, long live the iMessage and Whatsup exploits, because SW developers are not able to do things right.
I began a dispute on the English Wikipedia which revealed that more than a few people use “GIF” to describe, not a file format, but a visual style of looping animation.
> PNG, the lossless format is great for diagrams and stuff with sharp edges.
But also, like GIF, it's pointless when lossless WebP exists and is supported everywhere. It's more efficient. Lossy WebP does not make as much sense though since jpegli entered the game.
OP has made https://halide.cx/iris/ which could make lossy WebP make sense, but it's not open source or generally available.
> The new formats are interesting webp, avif, JXL and so on.
WebP was introduced 15 years ago. New relative to JPEG perhaps, but certainly not new.
PNGs will persist because I know that they're lossless by looking at the filename. When I hit File > Save as .png, I don't have to inspect output metadata (that image viewers don't expose) or play around with exporter settings.
It's unfortunate that we didn't give lossless webps a separate extension. Frankly I think even saving them as .png would've better than what we have now - people roughly understand that a .png is an image without artifacts, and any self-respecting image viewer will inspect magic bytes before opening a file anyways.
Being lossless is a function of the whole pipeline from an input image to an output image. The last step being encode to PNG doesn't guarantee anything about losslessness.
I do not know whether this has anything to do with any limitation in the WebP format, because it is more likely that this is some kind of bias in the kind of authors of Web pages who choose the WebP image format, who might also choose more aggressive compression settings, but for me WebP is a synonym for "low-quality image".
This means, that at least for the Web sites that I happen to access frequently, whenever I see PNG or JPEG images they typically have a better quality than when I see WebP images.
I do not know whether when browsing the Web I see frequently any AVIF images. They are either rare or they have a similar quality with JPEG images, so they did not stand out like WebP, where I perceived a degradation, so I noticed that the image format was different.
I do not care much about the speed of decoding Web images, because the speed of loading Web pages is determined mostly by the amount of junk JS that is included and not by the loading and decoding of the included images. So for me the quality of the included images is more important, thus WebP is something that I dislike, while JPEG is far too limited, so I would prefer JPEG XL images.
The arguments in TFA do not seem entirely honest, because the presented data confirms the low quality of WebP in comparison with JPEG XL, and because the 2 compared JPEG XL implementations differ in their performance by a factor more than 2, so it is likely that they are both immature and one could still accelerate the decoding of JPEG XL by at least 2 or 3 times in comparison with the best of them.
The only claim of TFA that seems valid, is that if AVIF is really as good as claimed, it could be sufficient for Web pages that want to show only highly-compressed images and good for replacing JPEG for such a use, while JPEG XL might be strictly required only for applications that need higher quality, i.e. for the processing and storing of photographic images.
But supported by no browser today and software support in general is quite limited. If the PNG authors would just incorporate this possibility into PNG from start it would be interesting, but it's too late now.
Gif is still there because it's still often the only option for frictionless video embedding. Embedded videos usually come with a video player that hardly ever quite works out well, often not starting automatically, not looping, or showing video player UI elementa that shouldnt be shown.
But this is quite a different format than JPEG or better said the subset of JPEG that we know today as JPEG format and the JPEG encoder/decoders support. The whole JPEG format did have support for a lossless mode for JPEG (different one than JPEG LS), arithmetic coding and 12-bit images too, but those features just didn't make it into the implementations of the format (arithmetic coding initially did, but was removed from popular implementations because of patents).
Png is still being updated, just last year it was updated to support a wider color space than any other web format. This shipped in all browsers before the official spec was publicly so you’ve been seeing Png upgrades without even realizing it
Also it would be nice to have a good standard vector format that isn't the complete kitchen-sink that is SVG, but we don't have that. We needed "jpeg but for vector graphics" and instead we got "html but for vector graphics".
So anybody saying "we should use more vectors" has to remember what the state of open vector graphics standards is.
In the context of the world it's all hair splitting, you can have a big photographic picture in png, or 1% compressed jpeg, or 1% jpeg converted to png. No new format can change it.
This is a good paragraph. I see people forget to apply that last sentence all the time.