A while ago I published this post about a better figure shortcode for Hugo that enabled lazy loading. Today, I bring you yet another update on the same shortcode. This time around, the focus is on leveraging the HTML picture element, which enables alternative versions of the same image in different formats, leaving the browser to decide which one to use. You can serve the same image in, for instance, JPEG-XL and plain old JPEG at the same time.

Gaia Sky has been using the OpenVR API from SteamVR for the last few years to power its Virtual Reality mode. However, the API is notoriously poorly documented, and it only works with the SteamVR runtime.1 That leaves out most of the existing VR headsets. Luckily, the main vendors and the community at large joined efforts to come up with an API that would be adopted by all and backed by the Khronos Group: OpenXR.

Edit (2023-03-30): Added a couple extra images to test for high-quality encoding and illustrations. Introduce SSIM and MSE measures.

Edit (2023-03-03): Fixed mistake, as AVIF does in fact NOT support progressive decoding.

Edit (2024-01-24): Following a comment on Mastodon, I have added a reference on the good performance of lossless WebP.

JPEG XL and AVIF are arguably the two main contenders in the battle to replace JPEG as the next-generation image format. There are other formats in the race, like HEIC and WebP 2, but the former is subject to licensing patents (and possibly not royalty-free), and the second is still in development and seems that it may never see the light of day as a production-ready image format anyway. The original WebP is not even a contender as it is inferior to AVIF in almost all aspects¹ (although it may be ok in lossless compression²), and you should probably never use it for photography anyway³, or at all if you are not ok with mediocre image quality.⁴

First, a quick browser support test:

If you are browsing this page around 2023, chances are that your browser supports AVIF but does not support JPEG XL. This is mainly due to the Chrome team dropping support for JPEGL XL against the opinion the community at large. In this post, I hope to convince you why this is a bad move. Below, I perform a quick analysis of lossless and lossy compression with JPEG XL and AVIF, and evaluate how they fare in terms of file size and visual quality.

After the acquisition of Twitter by the South African con-man and billionaire the free and open source social network world is generating a lot of heat. The number of users and nodes of Mastodon in particular and the Fediverse at large has been climbing steadily for months now. However, there is no shortage of people who voice their concerns about the federated nature of such services, which rely on centralized instances governed by small dictators with absolute power.

Just a short note. I have moved this site from Codeberg Pages to nearlyfreespeech.net. By the time you are reading this the move should already be finished. This hosting service is dirt-cheap for low-traffic static sites like mine. Right now, my estimated total sits at $0.31 per month, which is $3.72 per year. Less than the cheapest price per month offered by most other hosting providers. But they also only offer starting packages allocating many more resources than what is needed for simple static websites.

Edit (2023-04-05): Added some suggestions by the author/developer of libvips. Today I discovered libvips, a command line utility and library to manipulate and process images, and I am impressed. I’ve been using ImageMagick and its fork, GraphicsMagick, for as long as I have had to process images from the CLI, and they work well for moderately-sized images. But lately, I have been preparing virtual texture datasets for Gaia Sky and the sizes of my images have increased exponentially.