WebP is lossy though, no? The whole point of PNG is preserving the exact pixel data.
There’s also a lossless webp variant.
(This kind of lossy encoding would be possible with PNG too, but most PNG encoders don't have a lossy mode.)
(GIF is now patent-free, but PNG and FLIF are still better compression than GIF anyways.)
Pngs get used for both for non photographic images and photographic images with alpha channel, and JPEG XL should win on both of those use cases.
It also cleverly has an upgrade story forexisting JPEGs so I imagine a fairly quick uptake where a proxy can recompress an existing sites images and get better size with no recompression loss.
Something nice about FLIF is partial decoding. You can reasonably see a thumbnail by downloading just 5% of the full lossless file.
In conjunction with HTTP2 to progressively load all visible images first, this is a killer feature for the web, simplifying thumbnails and responsive design while vastly speeding up page loads and improving caching.
One thing that would be nice would be a way to tell whether a WebP is lossy (in which case you should only edit/resize the original file, to prevent degradation), or lossless (edit as much as you please).
In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand.
[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250073758
[2] https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platfor...