That's the point. The point of the analogy is precisely that there are existing formats that are capable of the same practical quality with much smaller file sizes. PNG is smaller than uncompressed TIFF. UTF-8 is much smaller than UTF-32.
I got your point but just FYI, TIFF supports 16bit per channel images. PNG and JPG do not. I think TIFF might also support floating point images. Those might be useful for raw manipulation and HDR. Safari supports TIFF BTW (or did last time I checked). No idea if there is a way to get access to the high res data in Safari though.
Actually, PNG supports 16 bit channels (as well as 1, 2 and 4 bits for paletted or greyscale images). TIFF meanwhile is kind of a kitchen-sink container format, so you can do quite a bit of strange things with it (store JPGs inside it, support tiling), but I don't think many viewers support everything in the TIFF standard.
> The standard allows indexed color PNGs to have 1, 2, 4 or 8 bits per pixel; grayscale images with no alpha channel may have 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16 bits per pixel. Everything else uses a bit depth per channel of either 8 or 16.
> TIFF is a flexible, adaptable file format for handling images and data within a single file, by including the header tags (size, definition, image-data arrangement, applied image compression) defining the image's geometry. A TIFF file, for example, can be a container holding JPEG (lossy) and PackBits (lossless) compressed images. A TIFF file also can include a vector-based clipping path (outlines, croppings, image frames).
> Actually, PNG supports 16 bit channels (as well as 1, 2 and 4 bits for paletted or greyscale images). TIFF meanwhile is kind of a kitchen-sink container format, so you can do quite a bit of strange things with it (store JPGs inside it, support tiling), but I don't think many viewers support everything in the TIFF standard.
Likewise, not many viewers (and certainly no browsers) support everything in the PNG standard. If you expect more than a simple compressor for some pixels, you're basically SoL when it comes to browsers.
This has come to nip myself (and others) when doing screenshots for old games such as Doom, where the pixel aspect ratio is not identical to the way they were displayed. It would be nice if we could just set the flag in PNG to tell it the display aspect ratio is 4:3, but literally no browsers support that flag. Instead we have to depend on lossy scaling so the pixel aspect ratio is identical to the display one.
