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So right away on the first item:
>Max image size is limited to 4K (3840x2160) in AVIF, which is a deal breaker to me. You can tile images, but seams are visible at the edges, which makes this unusable. JPEG XL supports image sizes of up to 1,073,741,823x1,073,741,824. You won’t run out of image space anytime soon.
>JXL has a maximum of 32 bits per channel. AVIF supports up to 10.
Max resolution and bit depth is certainly massively higher for for JPEG XL, but spec [0] says that:
>"NOTE: [AV1] supports 3 bit depths: 8, 10 and 12 bits, and the maximum dimensions of a coded image is 65536x65536, when seq_level_idx is set to 31 (maximum parameters level)."
And 12-bits per channel is considered a lot for end user final display formats? It also seems to be supported in browsers too so it's not just theoretical. It looks like back in 2021 there was discussion around this and clarifying that the profiles decided on in 2018/2019 were more about giving targets for hardware acceleration of the time, but software decoders by 2021 supported essentially the whole spec (and it appears to me that another 2 years later now final lingering stuff has been dealt with) [1,2]:
>Cyril has proposed a pull request (#130) to better clarify what is and is not supported in AVIF. In short, AVIF supports everything that AV1 supports, which includes 12-bit encoding. The current software decoder implementations also support more or less all of AV1, which can be seen if you try to decode a 12-bit AVIF file in a web browser.
And for still images, hardware acceleration isn't important, so as a practical matter unlike AV1 video pure software for max features is fine. So 65k x 65k and 36-bit color appear to be the limit, which definitely isn't as much as JPEG XL, but is pretty respectable for majority of end user usage?
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0: https://aomediacodec.github.io/av1-avif/#profiles-overview
1: https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/av1-avif/issues/128
2: https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/av1-avif/pull/130
One of the most interesting things to me is that JPEG-XL is under an open Patent License, unlike the original JPEG.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XL
Also, Google contributed quite a bit to it's development. As the patent grants show:
https://github.com/ImageMagick/jpeg-xl/blob/main/PATENTS
https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl/blob/main/PATENTS
Microsoft seemed to have gotten a patent on part of it's implementation (which Google also tried to get). Not sure if Google will pay to invalidate that patent, but I have a feeling they are more likely to defend AVIF.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/17/microsoft_ans_patent/
Google's control is a little concerning, but I do feel there are bigger fish to fry then choosing between two free formats. Like H.264 and H.265 patents.
One of the most interesting things to me is that JPEG-XL is under an open Patent License, unlike the original JPEG.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_XL
Also, Google contributed quite a bit to it's development. As the patent grants show:
https://github.com/ImageMagick/jpeg-xl/blob/main/PATENTS
https://github.com/libjxl/libjxl/blob/main/PATENTS
Microsoft seemed to have gotten a patent on part of it's implementation (which Google also tried to get). Not sure if Google will pay to invalidate that patent, but I have a feeling they are more likely to defend AVIF.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/17/microsoft_ans_patent/
Google's control is a little concerning, but I do feel there are bigger fish to fry then choosing between two free formats. Like H.264 and H.265 patents.
So a few dozen comments, but so far it doesn't look like any mention the immediate thing that jumped out at me which was the claims vs AVIF:
>"In turn, what users will be given is yet another facet of the web that Google itself controls: the AVIF format."
Huh? I'll admit I haven't been following codecs as super ultra closely as I used to, but I thought AOM was a pretty broad coalition of varying interests and AV1 an open, royalty free codec that was plenty open source friendly? I've heard plenty of reasonable arguments that JPEG XL has some real technical advantages over AVIF and as well as superior performance is much more feature rich and scalable. So I could see people being bummed for that. But this is the first time I've heard the assertion that it's somehow a Google project? I mean, AOM's libavif reference is BSD too [0]? I'd love some more details on that from anyone who has been following this more closely. I can even understand if AOM isn't as community friendly and an accusation that it's dominated by big corps, but in that case why single out Google alone? From wiki:
>The governing members of the Alliance for Open Media are Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics and Tencent.
Like, Google is certainly significant, but that's a lot of equally heavy hitters. And interesting that Mozilla is there too.
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0: https://github.com/AOMediaCodec/libavif
All of the people here who are so passionate about JPEG-XL will be happy to learn that there's nothing preventing them from using it on their sites right now:
https://github.com/niutech/jxl.js
If you want Chrome to ship with JPEG-XL support, use it. At some point, browser makers will decide it's worth the cost to them and all users to add it.
FWIW, https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf/issues/1249 ("Support form filling for at least 1040 irs form") has a comment saying "MuPDF-GL has the capability to edit fields and save the PDF" of a 1040.
I have just learned the Firefox 93 added support XFA - https://techdows.com/2021/10/open-xfa-pdfs-in-firefox.html .
So it would appear there are free software solutions to XFA forms.
Just because something doesn't seem far-fetched to you, doesn't mean most people will regard it as far-fetched.
Many people all sorts of "sectarian objections" - far more than there are SovCits or other tax protesters. Stallman has never come across as a tax protester. Ergo, I think it's far-fetched that "sectarian objections" is strongly associated with tax protests.
Further, at https://stallman.org/archives/2017-may-aug.html we can read Stallman opinine that we need to "return to the "bad old days", when Americans in general could have a decent life, not penury; when the US could afford to build what the public needed instead of privatizing everything with a toll" by making taxation more progressive. At https://stallman.org/archives/2011-jan-apr.html we read he supports "The Fairness in Taxation Act [which] would raise taxes to 45% on incomes over a million dollars a year."