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> In the past we had JPG our PNG: life was good. Simple. Easy.

Except for if you wanted a compressed image with transparency for the web, in which case you had to sacrifice one of those two things or use a different format besides those two.

> Then dumbfucks decided that it made sense to cram both lossy and lossless under the same umbrella.

> I don't understand the level of confusion and cluelessness that had to happen for such a dumb choice to have been made.

Besides many end users not caring which one it is as long as they recognize the file type and can open it, I found a few interesting reasons for having both in the same format from a simple web search. One was the possibility of having a lossy background layer with a lossless foreground layer (particularly in an animation).

JPEG XL also decided to support either lossless or lossy compression, so it wasn't just WebP that decided it made sense.



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