> 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 got an impression JPEG XL is not a single format, but many formats put under one brand (same as webp), you still need to choose these formats and transcode between them.
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.
I've always found it annoying how most cameras only let you save their photos as some combination of JPG/PNG/HEIC/RAW, often without any adjustable quality settings or option to save several copies in different formats.
It would be great if their behavior could be customized in a more modern web-friendly way, like "Save the original photo as a 95% quality AVIF in this folder, and also as an 70% quality resized WebP in this other folder".
The camera's I've owned (Canon and, in more recent years, Olympus/OM System) all could do RAW, JPG, or RAW+JPG, or in some cases cRAW+JPG, with several quality settings available for the JPG side.
But remember, on a camera you're wanting to maximize battery life, image quality and certain key performance metrics. The OM-1 Mk II can burst up to 120fps of 20 megapixel images with locked focus or 50fps with continuous AF. Thats a huge amount of data to capture, process and write to media. I think we want cameras to optimize for that. It's trivial to dump the resulting files on your computer and then convert between formats to your hearts content.
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.