Could you explain how so? JPEG XL seems cool enough but what about e.g. AVIF makes it "just a passive delivery format" instead of a general-purpose image format? It handles color spaces, lossless, lossy, up to 12 bit, up to 4:4:4/RGB, transparency, and animation at a good quality/size ratio so what's so drastically different about JPEG XL to move them to separate categories?
I think 12-bit colour stops it being adopted for ‘master’ images intended for editing. The current top comment says that 16-bit depth is a requirement for radiology. Also, I've read that its lossless encoding is often very poor — larger than PNG.
(I didn't downvote, BTW; it's a reasonable question.)
Assuming you meant "de"coding: it does, albeit I like JPEG XL's more. To me, that point seems an argument for things being the other way around anyways (i.e. general-purpose but not a good delivery format).
I am not sure how exactly the "progressive avif" works, but it looks like basically something optional that comes at a cost in the final file size, whereas in jxl some basic progressive encoding is always available (at least for lossy images) and doesn't come at a cost in file size.
the tldr is that video formats are relationship mediocre for images because the tradeoffs you make to compress an image that will be seen for 1/60th of a second are different than those for a static image.
Your point is not wrong in general but I want to nitpick that webp and avif are based on video compression techniques for I-frames which while themselves only shown for a single 1/FPS duration will impact a longer time slice of the video as other frames will reference them.
They're suited for delivery because they're based on video codecs (WebP on VP8, AVIF on AV1) for which consumer hardware typically has hardware decoding support, but were not designed for still images. AVIF is newer and substantially better than WebP, but still has limited colour depth and channels, so it's comparatively poor for editing. Lossless mode is not good for non-photo content. Encoding is relatively slow without hardware support.
> They're suited for delivery because they're based on video codecs (WebP on VP8, AVIF on AV1) for which consumer hardware typically has hardware decoding support,
But no one is doing HW decode for web images. (other than maybe Apple with JPEG? I've seen conflicting reports). AVIF images that aren't actually videos are always software decoded.