> I believe Web codecs should be purpose-built, efficient, and narrowly scoped to the needs of the Web.

The post downplays the usefulness of versatility. I disagree. I'd prefer not to play the "which image format is best for this image and this use case" game and having to transcode between them. For instance, it would be great if I could have an HTML gallery showing pictures of my files as I store them on harddisk. Today these are JPEG, because it's the lowest common denominator. WEBP, AVIF are not supported photography tools (e.g. https://support.captureone.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000262921...) and I don't expect support to ever be added since it is not formats intended for photography.

I've always found it annoying how most cameras only let you save their photos as some combination of JPG/PNG/HEIC/RAW, often without any adjustable quality settings or option to save several copies in different formats.

It would be great if their behavior could be customized in a more modern web-friendly way, like "Save the original photo as a 95% quality AVIF in this folder, and also as an 70% quality resized WebP in this other folder".

I personally find AVIF more versatile. I just throw images at it, and it does a great job. As the article identifies, JPEG XL performs worse than AVIF in general, but it's particularly bad at things like illustrations and screenshots. With AVIF I don't need to worry about that.