[solardev]

Sorry, but did you read my post? It's only backward-compatible in the sense that existing renderers can display SOMETHING -- but it's not the same image.

From the article:

> [...] like how color TV was introduced but it still worked on B&W TV's. New features can be added, as long as existing decoders ignore them and return a viewable image

Keyword "ignore them". To my reading, this means that CPNGs will contain several images inside them: A full-featured version with "color" (or HDR, or or whatever) for newer renderers, and a fallback one (in "black and white" in his example) for existing renderers.

It's not really "backward compatible", but more like "fallback-able".

[edflsafoiewq]

The first two extensions (constrained deflate, multithreaded encoding/decoding) only present optimization opportunities for the decoder. It is still the same image.

Single-threaded decoding of large PNGs is enough of a bottleneck that Apple has their own version of PNG with multithreading support.

[layer8]

It’s also not really a different format then, just a constrained form of PNG.

[brookst]

> CPNGs will contain several images inside them

That was not my read. When discussing HDR it’s clear that ONLY the extra bits are stored in a new data structure and are applied to the base image at display time.

So that gets you a bit-for-bit compatible image on old systems and HDR on new systems without duplicating data.

I believe that pattern applies throughout: a baseline, standard PNG image plus extra instructions and data for adding information to it.

[solardev]

Sorry, I didn't mean in terms of the codec or data deduplication. You're right, it's probably not implemented as actually having different images in the same file. That would be quite silly. Sorry for my ambiguity.

But functionally, this means that two renderers would have different outputs for the same file. It's not so bad when it's just HDR, but if this continues to grow, it WILL get bad. We've seen it many, many times before with hacked-on file extensions.

If it were Microsoft doing this (it's not), it would be just yet another embrace-extend-extinguish effort. But it's not. I have no doubt this author has good intentions, and this is a cool hack, but I think it will lead to confusion and poor outcomes in widespread usage.

It's really not great when an image format looks "somewhat" the same between renderers. In fact, I think that's worse than it not working at all. From experience, it leads to these situations where the same image can fragment over time just by virtue of being worked on by different people in different environments (apps, OSes, browsers, devices), and there's not really a clear way to tell which is which without extensively analyzing the metadata.

If Joe starts work on a HDR version, sends it to Sarah, Sarah adds a bunch of new edits but then saves it in an app that recompresses the image and overwrites the HDR, Joe might never know. And then if the format continues to expand, maybe a bit later Jane and Janet each add mutually incompatible extensions to the file without knowing it. The "base" image might look the same to all of these people, but each had specific edits in mind that the others might not have known about, because their renderers LOOKED like it was rendering the same image when it wasn't.

This isn't a hypothetical... it happened a lot when PNG first came out, and with PSD (Photoshop files) for a good decade or two until the subscription model came out.

[Dylan16807]

If someone edits a png I expect them to output a new file. So if they use the SDR version as a starting point... they use the SDR version, that's it, nothing else breaks. Everyone sees the same output from Sarah. You can have the same kind of issues with baseline png already; not every tool does all colors or editing effects correctly, and if someone uses a worse tool to edit then that's unfortunate.

[solardev]

Right, but not everyone is going to start from the SDR. Some might have the HDR version and not realize they're destroying the info. It gets worse the more forks and features you have.

There's just no advantage in overloading an old graphics format for something like this in a world where WebP and AVIF already exist.

As for editing tools, at least they're targeting the same baseline format (maybe with bugs). This is purposefully introducing new features that can only be used in some places, outside of the agreed standard.

[cycomanic]

Sure there is an advantage, I can put a png file everywhere without needing to care if the users system supports the new capability.

For a (made up) example let's say Firefox supports hdr, but Chrome doesn't, if I want to include an HDR image into a website, but display a SDR image if the browser can't display it, I need to implement a test for the browser to serve decide if I serve a WebP or PNG. That is a real cost.

[solardev]

What you see as a positive I see as potential for implementation details to diverge and cause user issues. We already have issues with WebP and AVIF rendering in some versions of Safari, and those are well established standards, not a lone wolf extension.

In theory an extended hacked PNG would have perfect backward compatibility, but the complexities of codecs more likely means it's going to appear as bugs in several implementations. Best case it falls back to SDR, but it's also possible some broken implementation leads to HDR content being displayed in a SDR setup and everything getting all washed out.

Having the same file format/extension actually host several different versions never works well. Graphic artists and support teams have to deal with rendering quirks like this all the time because some developer thought their hack was a genius overload :/

[Sardtok]

This is built into HTML, where you can supply multiple files in a srcset.

[jameshart]

I have bad news for you: the existing PNG standard specifies the following optional chunks that compatible renderers are free to follow or ignore, producing different renderings of the same image:

cHRM - Primary chromaticities and white point

gAMA - Image gamma

iCCP - Embedded ICC profile

[naikrovek]

so all image formats should be at version 1.0 and never be improved? come on.

[solardev]

Once stable, yes, absolutely! There should be a reference standard that renderers adhere to. Then they should be versioned for future improvement. That doesn't mean there can't be bug and security fixes, but they should be feature-stable.

There's a reason why JPEG and PNG are so popular: because they ARE stable and unchanging, in a world of failed adoption for APNG, WebP, HVEC, JPEG 2000, JPEG XL, AVIF, etc.

For image formats, broad compatibility is way way way more important than small gains in codec performance and filesize.

----

Edit: From memory, this is something we learned the hard way back in the 90s and early 2000s, when image (and other) formats saw very rapid development and bandwidth was still hard to get. PNG was a huge improvement over GIF, and that mattered a lot over 56k modems. But the road to its adoption was very difficult, with many features only partially supported for years in different apps.

When WebP launched, it was objectively better in most ways compared to both PNG and JPEG, but it still saw limited uptake. Part of that was the titans fighting amongst themselves (other tech companies didn't want to adopt a Google format), but also by that point both JPEG and PNG were good enough and connections & CPUs were good enough. The incremental improvement it offered rarely justified it sometimes not working for some users on some browsers.

It's a similar situation for many other formats: H.264 in a MP4 is good enough, MP3s are still good enough, etc. On the other hand, PDFs and DOC/DOCX have different features depending on what reader you use (such as PDF forms, JS validation, accessibility, or DOCX not rendering the same on different readers), and it's a mess.

[ksec]

>When WebP launched, it was objectively better in most ways compared to both PNG and JPEG,

It was not. Optimised JPEG was on par or sometimes better than WebP.

[solardev]

For a given image, that's possible, but if memory serves, the good enough defaults usually led to the WebP version being smaller across a library of image samples, statistically speaking. But that may not have been true for an individual image.

And either format could be manually optimized even more.

[sroussey]

GIF had patents from CompuServe, one of the reasons for PNG.

[jj999]

GIF uses LZW compression which was patented by Unisys.

[jameshart]

> There's a reason why JPEG and PNG are so popular: because they ARE stable and unchanging

PNG is on version 1.2

[miragecraft]

The news of JPEG XL’s death is greatly exaggerated.