Hello JPEG, my old friend
I've come to post you again
Because a vision softly blurring
Left its compression while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains within the artifacts of JPEG
In restless dreams I browsed alone
Narrow memes of low quality
'Neath the halo of a monitor
I turned my eyes to the blurry screen
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a pixel light
That split the night
And touched the artifacts of JPEG
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand memes, maybe more
People reposting without sharing
People uploading without caring
People posting things that eyes once saw
And no one dared
Disturb the artifacts of JPEG
"Fools", said I, "You do not know
JPEG like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my files that I might reach you"
But my words, like silent raindrops, fell
And echoed in the blur of JPEG
And the people bowed and prayed
To the JPEG god they made
And the website flashed out its repost
In the words that it was compressing
And the website said, "The answer to your query
Is lost in the data
And it's all in the artifacts of JPEG"
It is, but it probably shouldn't be any more.
WebP has good support everywhere now and is slightly better than JPEG and PNG combined.
(Better lossy compression than JPEG, plus transparency support, and better lossless compression than PNG).
But even WebP is considered lame these days compared to the new crop.
E.g., JXL (JPEG XL) is much better WebP and is supported by everyone except Google (which is ironic since Google helped create it).
Google seems to want AVIF to be the winner for the new image format, but not many others do.
Anyway, until the Google JXL AVIF hissy fit is dealt with, at least we've still got WebP.
It's not super great, but it's at least better than JPEG and PNG.
A lot of web developers are stuck in their old JPEG PNG mindset and are being slow to adapt, so JPEG is still hanging around.
I found out a long time ago that I can’t hear the difference between compression levels starting at 192kbps. So there really isn’t any use for lossless for me.