> One final significant benefit of JPEG XL is that it has a broad scope: while it is a great format for web delivery, this is not the only use case it was designed for. JPEG XL can also be used as a capture format, where it can play a role similar to current camera raw formats: high precision, high dynamic range, lossless or minimal lossy compression. It can also be used as an authoring format, supporting named layers, selection masks, multiple alpha channels. It can be used for printing use cases, supporting e.g. CMYK and spot colors. It can be used for medical or scientific applications, supporting high-precision lossless compression and multispectral imaging. And so on. It is a general-purpose format that covers many different use cases for digital imaging.
So that's all impressive and useful and probably quite good, but my first reaction is that sinking feeling from being faced with unexpected complexity. Is the JXL format a nightmare internally? Is it a nightmare to use the library as an inexperienced app developer? Do you need to care about those unusual features if you just want to display an image? I expect that it's all fine, since what little I've heard has been good. If so, kudos to the designers because that's an ambitious feature list. It feels uncommon for a format of any kind to set out to be all things to all people and succeed.
So that's all impressive and useful and probably quite good, but my first reaction is that sinking feeling from being faced with unexpected complexity. Is the JXL format a nightmare internally? Is it a nightmare to use the library as an inexperienced app developer? Do you need to care about those unusual features if you just want to display an image? I expect that it's all fine, since what little I've heard has been good. If so, kudos to the designers because that's an ambitious feature list. It feels uncommon for a format of any kind to set out to be all things to all people and succeed.