An average page is now over 1200kB in size and 60% of that is in images. With all the focus on performance and speed across the web performance industry, you would think that innovating on better image formats would be a top agenda item. Not so. Instead, we are living in a self-imposed world of scarcity of formats, effectively limiting ourselves to gif’s, png’s and jpeg’s.
In practice, deploying new image formats has been painful - just think back to the saga of png. But one would also hope that png was not the last. In fact, if we really want to make an impact on web performance, then image formats is the place to do it. There is absolutely no reason why we shouldn't have dozens of specialized formats, each tailored for a specific case and type of image. But before we get there, we need to iron out some kinks...