Should we have a new *widely used* image format?

[ZiNgA BuRgA]

The 3 popular web formats, GIF, JPEG and PNG are really quite old (maybe not so much PNG).

Random info
GIF has been mostly superseeded by PNG, but unfortunately, there's no standard for animated PNGs, which is where one might still decide to use GIFs (ignoring IE6 compatibility).  MNG and APNG have tried this, but haven't exactly gained much popularity.  Besides, these formats do not do inter-frame compression (APNG is just a series of PNG images stuck together), so animations made with these can often be huge in terms of filesize.

JPEG is a very old format (like 20 years old) which is often criticised for screwing up images etc with its compression artefacts.  Basically all modern video encoders can beat JPEG at still image compression.  Despite this, it's still widely used, both on the web and in other places, such as digital cameras.
Attempts have been made to replace JPEG (without much success), such as JPEG2000, Microsoft's JPEG XR and Google's recently announced WebP format.  I'm not sure about the former, but Google says that it plans to add alpha channel support for WebP, so it may in fact attempt to replace PNG in some circumstances.  Anyway, WebP is based on a single frame of the WebM (VP8) format.
One thing I do wonder is, however, why not leverage this fancy video codec to get rid of the old GIF format?

Or maybe, when HTML5 is finalised, we could use the <video> tag to "replace" the <img> tag?

Disadvantages?
Now, whilst single frame video compression can significantly out-do JPEG, delivering better quality at smaller filesizes, it does come at a performance penalty.  That is, the decoder (browser) will most likely have to use more resources to display these formats.
This may make things more difficult on mobile phone browsers, for example.


So...
As webite administrators, do you think we need another image format?
Do you think Google's WebP will take off?

[techu]

I like to use mostly PNG in my designs but it is not supported in IE so I have to add IE6 fix. But I do do use gif if the image is not so complex, so it saves me from adding it to the PNG fix for IE6......

I dont thing webp is going to take off anytime soon, more over in a world where IE6 is still being used, none of the web designer will risk using a new format that is not supported by most of the browsers specially the old once.

[ZiNgA BuRgA]

I think Windows 7 is starting to signal the end of IE6, so that'll probably not last too much longer...

But IE will probably be the slow factor here in terms of support.  Chrome, Opera and Firefox could add support fairly quickly.

Fair point.

[techu]

(11-01-2010 08:02 PM)ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:  I think Windows 7 is starting to signal the end of IE6, so that'll probably not last too much longer...

But IE will probably be the slow factor here in terms of support.  Chrome, Opera and Firefox could add support fairly quickly.

Fair point.

I agree that windows 7 has taken over many xp machines but most organisation specially government organisation still uses windows xp/ie...

[TriTop]

(11-01-2010 11:24 PM)techu Wrote:  .... but most organisation specially government organisation still uses windows xp/ie...

and ie6. I know what Im talking about.

For private projects png is first choice. IE6 users obtain a message. <!--[if lt IE 6]>bla..<![endif]-->

[ZiNgA BuRgA]

All computers at work are XP+IE6, as well as all library computers here.
However, with MS starting to drop XP support I think it's only a matter of time before XP gets replaced.

[techu]

(11-02-2010 12:10 PM)ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:  All computers at work are XP+IE6, as well as all library computers here.
However, with MS starting to drop XP support I think it's only a matter of time before XP gets replaced.

I hope that this transition to complete fast because IE6 can be a pain in the neck for web designers..

[MattF]

(11-02-2010 12:24 PM)techu Wrote:  I hope that this transition to complete fast because IE6 can be a pain in the neck for web designers..

Only if you continue to code for it. I can't be arsed with working around it these days. I just make sure my code is usable in all common browsers, and then if the layout or other things aren't spot bollock in IE6, it's a simple case of tough.