There was a constraint - since 2009, the Joint Photographic Experts Group had published JPEG XR, JPEG XT and JPEG XS, and they were probably reluctant to break that naming scheme.
They're running out of good options, but I hope they stick with it long enough to release "JPEG XP" :-)
In the photography world it's shorthand for "photo unedited straight from the camera". Popular with Fujifilm cameras especially due to their 'film simulation' modes which apply basically a filter to the image.
What makes jpeg compression bad isn’t low bandwidth. It’s really good at compressing an image for that.
What makes jpeg bad is that the compression artifacts multiply when a jpeg gets screen captured and then re-encoded as a jpeg, or automatically resized and recompressed by a social media platform. And that definitely isn’t a problem that has gone away since dialup, people do that more than ever.
I'm not saying it's true, I obviously understand that not all jpegs are low quality and over compressed. That's just how the word is generally used by people, especially those outside of tech who aren't well versed in different image formats.
It seems to me this point of discussion always tends to get way too much focus. Should it really raise concern?
Of all the people who interact with image formats in some way, how many do even know what an image format is? How many even notice they’ve got different names? How many even give them any consideration? And out of those, how many are immediately going to think JPEG XL must be big, heavy and inefficient? And out of those, how many are going to stop there without considering that maybe the new image format could actually be pretty good? Sure, there might be some, but I really don’t think it’s a fraction of a significant size.
Moreover, how many people in said fraction are going to remember the name (and thus perhaps the format) far more easily by remembering it’s got such a stupid name?
Actually, I remember when JPEG XL came out, and I just thought: cool, file that one away for when I have a really big image I need to display. Which turned out to be never.
I regularly work with images larger than 65,535px per side.
WEBP can only do 16,383px per side and the AVIF spec can technically do 65,535, but encoders tap out far before then. Even TIFF uses 32-bit file offsets so can't go above 4GB without custom extensions.
Guess which format, true to its name, happens to support 1,073,741,823px per side? :-)
Honestly, that's exactly what it sounds like to me too. I know it's not, but it's still what it sounds like. And it's just way too many letters total. When we have "giff" and "ping" as one-syllable names, "jay-peg-ex-ell" is unfortunate.
Really should have been an entirely new name, rather than extending what is already an ugly acronym.
