Comment by spider-mario
3 months ago
Since the recompression is lossless, you don’t need every tool you use to support it, as long as one of them is one that can do the decompression back to JPEG. This sounds a bit like complaining that you can’t upload .7z everywhere.
AFAIK downconverting to jpeg is only an option for legacy jpegs that have been upconverted to jpegxl though. Many jpegxl images likely won't support downconverting if they were created as jxl from the get-go.
Basically, jpeg->jxl->jpeg is perfectly lossless conversion, but a newly-made jxl->jpeg is not, even if it doesn't use modern jxl-only features like alpha channels.
With that in mind I'd actually prefer if those were treated as separate file-formats with distinct file-extensions (backwards-compatible jpeg->jxls vs pure-jxl). The former could be trivially handled with automated tools, but the latter can't.
I'm not sure if that will be an issue in practice. in any case, you need a JPEG XL decoder to perform the transition from a recompressed-JPEG-JXL to the original JPEG, so whatever tool is doing this, it can already handle native-JXL too. it could be the conversion happens on the server side and the client always sees JPEG, in which case a native JXL can also be decoded to a JPEG (or if lossless a PNG), though obviously with information loss since JPEG is a subset of JXL (to put it lightly)
Well, sure, but wasn’t that the use case we were discussing?
Right. And that particular use-case sounds nice, but realistically this new format will not be exclusively used in that particular case.
Dealing with basically another .webp-like format in those cases (one that might be a backwards-compatible jpeg or might not and determining that can only be done by inspecting the file contents) doesn't sound super fun.
So ideally, to make up names, I wish they'd used separate extensions and so a ".jp3" is a file that can be downconverted to a jpg and you could get a browser extension to automate that for you if you wanted, and a ".jxl" is the new file format that's functionally another ".webp"-like thing to deal with and all the pain-points that implies.
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