alt Hacker NewsImage formats goes in era, and there's no need for monoculture. But given we're talking exabytes of data, for this era, the author rightly articulates why AVIF should win. Should JPEGXL2 beat it in the future then it can take over for a decade. We seem to essentially have gone through like 4 formats so far: gif, jpg, PNG and webp. On vector side, SVG has no real competition - it's solid.
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> But given we're talking exabytes of data, for this era, the author rightly articulates why AVIF should win.
I'm not sure this is the right conclusion to draw...
1) The author's pain point (use case) is hardware pricing - presuming that goes down (as either AI demands drops/and or production increases), this does not speak to a demand for size, instead, it is about doing more with less...
2) I'm not certain that the exabytes of demand (assuming it comes) will be from AVIF. Rather, if data is important, I think the demand will be a different format entirely (archives, for instance). Demand for more (quality) data might paradoxically call for less compression and less cpu-intensive qualities - uncompressed, raw data, for instance. If is faster and cheaper than bothering with complex algorithms, then simpler formats should be more prevalent.
Building on 1 and 2, a more capable image format, like JPEG-XL, becomes a more logical choice, not the one that can compress the best or is the smallest (in an exa-byte-as-the-norm world).
The author is explicitly arguing for an AVIF monoculture. AVIF isn't an appropriate format for an image format monoculture, but JPEG-XL could be.
"We should use AVIF for most web images" is a different statement which I have no problem with.