Content suggestion: JPEG 2000

What is the new suggestion?

Expand documentation for JPEG 2000.

Why is it important or useful?

JPEG 2000 is royalty free now and, according to Cloudinary (link below), has some strengths despite its age (explained in following sections).

How many pages are likely to be needed?

For adding pages, only a glossary page needs to be added. However, JPEG 2000 related content should be added to the following pages:

• Image file type and format guide
• Apache Configuration: .htaccess
• <img>: The Image Embed element
• Common MIME types
• MIME types (IANA media types)
• Navigator.share()

In addition, the only page that has "JPEG2000" (Multimedia: Images) has incorrect information.

• JPEG2000 does support progressive display
• Single-core encoding and decoding speed are superior to HEIC and AVIF.

How much time do you think this work should take?

Not good at estimating, but I'd say two weeks at most.

Will the work enable learners or professionals to achieve their goals better?

Yes. Learners absolutely should learn about an old but still excellent image format, and professionals who use or work with high-fidelity or lossless photographic images could benefit from its greater efficiency over HEIC and AVIF. They should also learn about image formats that Firefox doesn't support (i.e. JPEG 2000, HEIC), just as the Web video codec guide already specifies video formats that Firefox doesn't support (i.e. MP4V-ES and MPEG-1 Part 2 Video).

Does it address critical needs in the web industry?

Well, I wouldn't exactly call it "critical". Along with the strengths already mentioned, although JPEG XL may be a superior format to JPEG 2000 overall, JPEG 2000 is actually superior with respect to at least the following limits.

• JPEG 2000 has a maximum image dimensions of 4,294,967,295 x 4,294,967,295, as opposed to 2,147,483,647 x 2,147,483,647 for PNG, and 1,073,741,823 x 1,073,741,823 for JPEG XL.
• JPEG 2000 has a maximum bit depth of 38, as opposed to 32 for JPEG XL.
• JPEG 2000 has a maximum of 16384 channels, as opposed to 4099 for JPEG XL

Is the work an operational necessity, i.e. is not having it a security risk?

No security risks from the lack of JPEG 2000 and admittedly there may not be a huge demand for it (at least for now), but...

Does the content help make the web more ethical?

Absolutely!

The more recent a standard is made, the more likely third parties will demand licensing fees from it (IANAL). This is what happened to AV1, which was initially released only four years ago, and which AVIF is based on. It may only be a matter of time before third parties demand licensing fees on JPEG XL as well. Now I'm not saying that those two formats are not royalty free, as third parties may be wrong in their claims or whatnot. However, because not all companies, let alone individuals, have an army of lawyers for defense, not everyone is willing to adopt new free standards. For this reason, Digium didn't accept a contribution of Opus and VP8 in the svn repositories for Asterisk back in 2013. It also may be a reason why the vast majority of websites (as far as I can tell) still use the original JPEG format.

However, using standards made at least two decades ago is generally safer from a legal standpoint. Therefore, if more browsers aside from Safari and GNOME Web support a more established standard that still has strengths today, I truly believe that JPEG 2000 will have a much greater adoption that I truly believe it deserves. Because of that, although a content suggestion for documentation may not be the right place for this, I'd even go as far as to implore Bug 36351 to be reopened and include JPEG 2000 support on the Firefox browser (I think it already supports JPEG 2000 for PDF files).

Other supporting information

https://cloudinary.com/blog/time_for_next_gen_codecs_to_dethrone_jpeg