>medical images
Isn't JPEG-XL a lossy codec?
Isn't JPEG-XL a lossy codec?
While lossy codec is hard to compare and up for debate. JPEG-XL is actually better as a lossless codec in terms of compression ratio and compression complexity. There is only one other codec that beats it but it is not open source.
Its developer is also developing HALAC (High Availability Lossless Audio Compression). He recently released the source code for the first version of HALAC. And I don't think anyone cared.
I sure hope they came up with a good, clear system to distinguish them.
I was thinking that too, but on the other hand, even a lossless file can't guarantee that its contents aren't the result of going through a lossy intermediate format, such as a screenshot created from a JPEG.
There are so many reasons why it's almost hard to know where to begin. But it's basically the same reason why it's helpful for some documents to end in .docx and others to end in .xlsx. It tells you what kind of data is inside.
And at least for me, for standard 24-bit RGB images, the distinction between lossy and lossless is much more important than between TIFF and PNG, or between JPG and HEIC. Knowing whether an image is degraded or not is the #1 important fact about an image for me, before anything else. It says so much about what the file is for and not for -- how I should or shouldn't edit it, what kind of format and compression level is suitable for saving after editing, etc.
After that comes whether it's animated or not, which is why .apng is so helpful to distinguish it from .png.
There's a good reason Microsoft Office documents aren't all just something like .msox, with an internal tag indicating whether they're a text document or a spreadsheet or a presentation. File extensions carry semantic meaning around the type of data they contain, and it's good practice to choose extensions that communicate the most important conceptual distinctions.
This is an arbitrary distinction, for example then why do mp3 and ogg (vorbis) have different extensions? They're both lossy audio formats, so by that requirement, the extension should be the same.
Otherwise, we should distinguish between bitrates with different extensions, eg mp3128, mp3192, etc.
Filenames also of course try to indicate technical compatibility as to what applications can open them, which is why .mp3 and .ogg are different -- although these days, extensions like .mkv and .mp4 tell you nothing about what's in them, or whether your video player can play a specific file.
At the end of the day it's just trying to achieve a good balance. Obviously including the specific bitrate in a file extension goes too far.
Unfortunately we have been through this discussion and author of JPEG-XL strongly disagree with this. I understand where they are coming from, but for me I agree with you it would have been easier to have the two separated in naming and extensions.
But how can you know that from the fact that it's currently losslessly encoded? People take screenshots of JPEGs all the time.
> After that comes whether it's animated or not, which is why .apng is so helpful to distinguish it from .png.
That is a useful distinction in my view, and there's some precedent for solutions, such as how Office files containing macros having an "m" added to their file extension.
And in my case I'm usually dealing with a known workflow. I know where the files originally come from, whether .raw or .ai or whatever. It's very useful to know that every .jpg file is meant for final distribution, whereas every .png file is part of an intermediate workflow where I know quality won't be lost. When they all have the same extension, it's easy to get confused about which stage a certain file belongs to, and accidentally mix up assets.
Be careful to ascribe reason to established common practices; it can lead to tunnel vision. Computing is filled with standards which are nothing more than “whatever the first guy came up with”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition
Just because metadata is useful doesn’t mean it needs to live in the filename.
pngquant and similar tools disagree
Although, if you're purely speaking perceptually, magic like RAISR comes pretty close.