September 8, 2024
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5 min read
It could have used some more time in the oven, but the Apple Keynote on Monday has forced our hand! After a site is ‘final’, we usually take the time to double- and triple-check each of the breakpoints, the metadata, and clean up any CSS that didn’t end up being used. We had to push the site to staging at 1 a.m. September 7th, and we just didn’t have time to tweak all of that. This means that we – along with the community – will have to make the final edits before it’s pushed live before the Apple event.
It’s hard to pass along our baby to the community, but it’s great to have so many people pitching in to make the final push. Definitely going to be some design decisions we don’t agree with, but that’s the nature of an open-source project. Will have to be cognizant of ”design by committee’, which as we’ve seen over and over rarely works (see every Linux distribution). We’re hoping we can put together some style guides in the near future to keep it all on track.
The community surprised us a bit by not being as focussed on the design as they were on the example images we used to show JXL’s compression abilities. Definitely lots of strong feelings there and many of the images might be swapped out. I guess all that work to dynamically load them from JSON files paid off!
In retrospect, building the site in Webflow was probably a mistake (I will be reaching out to them about properly supporting JPEG XL). But hindsight and all that… We just didn’t realize the amount of custom code we’d need to create. I guess it would be different if we were a design shop! But man, that would have been crazy to build out those all that breakpoint code by hand. We got there, so that's what counts.
All that being said, we’re super excited that it’s finally out and the world gets to see it! Fingers crossed the Apple event mentions JPEG XL now. If you haven't go check out jpegxl.info!