[jacobolus]

The point is that you want support for those features (certainly the core codecs, etc.) in the spec, so if you send someone a file you can be sure they can read it.

TIFF is not useful if you want to use a state-of-the-art lossy codec and get hardware-accelerated decoding on an arbitrary mobile device, or if you want to display an animated image with transparency on a web page.

[astrange]

But can you actually get people to implement it if you make it that complicated? Images are pretty hard, hardware support is /actually/ really hard.

That's why it's best to accept whatever format is already out there and author to it - the only thing that matters is that it actually works when it's out there.

Actually I'm surprised there's still no good way to do animations with transparency, but maybe nobody wants to use it?