Thanks for the compliment about FLIF&#x27;s progressive decoding! (FLIF author speaking here)<p>However, truncated FLIF files will (probably) never achieve the same quality&#x2F;size ratio as dedicated lossy methods that can produce a completely different file for each quality setting.<p>So at the moment I still see an important use case for lossy methods. However, in the future, I can imagine that people will start to demand&#x2F;expect lossless encoding, to avoid generation loss and to get the most out of their display hardware.
E.g. higher bit depths are becoming a thing, while the JPEG&#x2F;WebP color space (YCbCr) is effectively less than 22 bits per pixel (roughly speaking, red and blue are only 7-bit), and chroma subsampling makes this even worse. Also what&#x27;s the use of ever higher display resolutions if most of those pixels are only displaying compression artifacts or blur?
Lossy formats like JPEG&#x2F;WebP&#x2F;BPG&#x2F;JP2&#x2F;JXR are good at medium-quality, but if you use them at a near-lossless quality setting (e.g. 99 or 100 for JPEG), they often produce bigger files than lossless formats.<p>Meanwhile, the range of display sizes is getting larger: while in the past, we had a range from say 13&quot; monitors to 21&quot; monitors, now we have a range from 1.5&quot; smart watches to huge 100&quot; smart TVs. I do think that in order to avoid huge amounts of rescaling&#x2F;transcoding, we need image&#x2F;video formats that are &quot;responsive by design&quot;, like JPEG2000 and FLIF (and progressive JPEG to some extent).