if you could pick a standard format for a purpose what would it be and why?
e.g. flac for lossless audio because…
(yes you can add new categories)
summary:
- photos .jxl
- open domain image data .exr
- videos .av1
- lossless audio .flac
- lossy audio .opus
- subtitles srt/ass
- fonts .otf
- container mkv (doesnt contain .jxl)
- plain text utf-8 (many also say markup but disagree on the implementation)
- documents .odt
- archive files (this one is causing a bloodbath so i picked randomly) .tar.zst
- configuration files toml
- typesetting typst
- interchange format .ora
- models .gltf / .glb
- daw session files .dawproject
- otdr measurement results .xml
All of them are OK, except mkv is less a file type and more a container. What should be specified is the code for video, which for most things I'd say AV1, but high res movies might not be the most suitable. Throw in opus for the audio track, and you can use mkv, but might as well use webm anyways since it's more clear what's behind it. (though can still be other things)
I'd also add that jxl should be the standard for lossy images. Better than jpg. And you want something other than png for massive images because that quickly gets costly in terms of size due to png being lossless.
Unpopular opinion but webp isn't bad it just needs wider support, but maybe I'm unaware of its actual shortcomings in which case please educate.
Also I wonder if it's possible to have a single image format for all those uses but also RAW?
Here's a little article which highlights jxl well. https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/02/28/modern-data-compression-in-2021-part-2-the-battle-to-dethrone-jpeg-with-jpeg-xl-avif-and-webp/
I do not think it's mentioned there, but I think webp and also it's indirect successor avif afaik, both lack progressive loading which is not optimal for website loading. It's has incremental loading which I think is akin the the old dial up time of loading top to bottom row for row. They proclaim progressive decoding is costly on memory and cpu, but progressive gives the best user experience imo.
Lastly a fringe issue, re-encooding multiple times. The good old reason why jpgs turn into trash over time because people encode instead of save images. Or because sites re-encode when uploading. Jxl wins here. It also is very easy to see why jpg turns into what it does rather quickly.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/ju18pz/generation_loss_comparing_jpeg_webp_jxl_and_avif/
I also like the idea of incremental loading, even if it's not that relevant anymore. Also, I don't think your example of generation loss is enough as it's just one image, I would like to see multiple randomly picked images passed through the same process but if the results are the same as here or barely anymore loss than the best option for any given image I do think that's a good result to aim for.
Png is not always lossless. It also supports compression. But your point stands, it's not the best compression
PNG support lossless compression through deflation, but there are encoders that can apply a lossy filter to the image to make the compression more effective.
PNG doesn't support lossy compression natively, to be clear.
That's interesting. Learn something new every day. Thanks