Comment by Pxtl
3 months ago
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.
The names and extensions of JPEG XL files aren't specified, except that the IANA media type is `image/jxl`. I think an argument could be made to use the double extension convention when the encoder performs lossless JPEG recompression, so image.jpg becomes image.jpg.jxl (while not entirely semantically correct, since it's not an additional layer of compression around the JPEG, it's a reimplementation of the image using identical coding features as JPEG, in JXL).
But like I said in my other comment (which got hidden for some reason), it should be noted that a recompressed JPEG is also a valid JXL on its own. If you have the means to turn a recompressed JPEG into the original, you also have the means to view native JXLs.
Hopefully adoption is widespread and we won't really have to worry about it. JPEG XL is a much more appealing format than WebP, and unlike WebP there are great arguments for software to support it other than "Google started using them, so they're everywhere now."