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Comment by joeblubaugh | Hacker News Reader

The second paragraph doesn’t follow from my question, because it assumes JPEG XL does become useful on the web. The author believes AVIF is too far ahead already.

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I suspect the name alone will help drive adoption, especially from non-technical people. Heck, I'm reasonably technical myself (but not expert in image formats) and my first instinct on encountering AVIF was to say "AVIF? Does that stand for AVI File?" And I would have assumed that it's a video format, not an image format. Whereas JPEG XL would have everyone who has ever used a digital camera saying "Ah, it's got JPEG in the name, that means it's a photo format".

Never underestimate the power of a well-known brand name in communicating things to people who know nothing else about the subject. The name is a big part of why I suspect JPEG XL will take off in popularity. (The lossless conversion to and from classic JPEG format is the other main reason).

For me, the name JPEG XL evoked a feeling of “this is going to be a lossy-only format with visible artifacts when used on raster images”, so I don’t think it’s a good name.

There’s also a migration path where jpeg can be converted to jpeg xl losslessly. You can convert a jpeg to jxl then back to jpeg and its byte for byte identical.

JXL is moments away from having almost universal web support. Safari supports it already, Chrome and Firefox are already set to turn the flag on by default in the next releases.

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