I think the solely reason why JPEG XL did not go off is simple: It had no lobby. No large tech company actively promotes it and so, many people hadn't heard of it. Ironically, the deprecation of it in chrome made me aware of it in the first place.
Technically, JPEG XL may be a superior contestant. But from a 'social' point of view? Disastrous, especially considering it already has "JPEG" in it. (To be fair, its also quite young...)
I really hope JPEG XL gets more traction because it seems like a really good successor to the old namesake.
Personally, the name always turned me off. I saw the option in photoshop when saving files, but my thinking went "jpg bad, jpg XL is a weird name, must be a minor incremental improvement over jpg".
I don't particularly like the name either, but it already had a name before it existed — that's the way JPEG works, the ones who write the Call for Proposals give it a name, not the ones who actually bring the proposals and design the new codec.
Anyway, I think "jxl" will in practice be the more common way to refer to JPEG XL images, and the full name will at some point become a matter of etymology and trivia questions.
Now imagine that you saw a presentation couple years back with all the nice features that smart people packed in… and here is what it came to, parlor games basically.
Maybe a nimbler PR approach would help, but then we know that standards like websql are shutdown over nothing, even though sqlite eating the world alive…
Technically, JPEG XL may be a superior contestant. But from a 'social' point of view? Disastrous, especially considering it already has "JPEG" in it. (To be fair, its also quite young...)
I really hope JPEG XL gets more traction because it seems like a really good successor to the old namesake.