alt Hacker News> I believe Web codecs should be purpose-built, efficient, and narrowly scoped to the needs of the Web.
The post downplays the usefulness of versatility. I disagree. I'd prefer not to play the "which image format is best for this image and this use case" game and having to transcode between them. For instance, it would be great if I could have an HTML gallery showing pictures of my files as I store them on harddisk. Today these are JPEG, because it's the lowest common denominator. WEBP, AVIF are not supported photography tools (e.g. https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000262921...) and I don't expect support to ever be added since it is not formats intended for photography.
I personally find AVIF more versatile. I just throw images at it, and it does a great job. As the article identifies, JPEG XL performs worse than AVIF in general, but it's particularly bad at things like illustrations and screenshots. With AVIF I don't need to worry about that.