A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, Ernie Smith’s newsletter, which hunts for the end of the long tail.
For roughly three decades, the JPEG has been the World Wide Web’s primary image format. But it wasn’t the one the Web started with. In fact, the first mainstream graphical browser, NCSA Mosaic, didn’t initially support inline JPEG files—just inline GIFs, along with a couple of other formats forgotten to history. However, the JPEG had many advantages over the format it quickly usurped.
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Despite not appearing together right away—it first appeared in Netscape in 1995, three years after the image standard was officially published—the JPEG and web browser fit together naturally. JPEG files degraded more gracefully than GIFs, retaining more of the picture’s initial form—and that allowed the format to scale to greater levels of success. While it wasn’t capable of animation, it progressively expanded from something a modem could pokily render to a format that was good enough for high-end professional photography.
For the internet’s purposes, the degradation was the important part. But it wasn’t the only thing that made the JPEG immensely valuable to the digital world. An essential part was that it was a documented standard built by numerous stakeholders.
The GIF was a de facto standard. The JPEG was an actual one
How important is it that JPEG was a standard? Let me tell you a story.
During a 2013 New York Times interview conducted just before he received an award honoring his creation, GIF creator Steve Wilhite stepped into a debate he unwittingly created. Simply put, nobody knew how to pronounce the acronym for the image format he had fostered, the Graphics Interchange Format. He used the moment to attempt to set the record straight—it was pronounced like the peanut butter brand: “It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story,” he said.
I posted a quote from Wilhite on my popular Tumblr around that time, a period when the social media site was the center of the GIF universe. And soon afterward, my post got thousands of reblogs—nearly all of them disagreeing with Wilhite. Soon, Wilhite’s quote became a meme.
The situation paints how Wilhite, who died in 2022, did not develop his format by committee. He could say it sounded like “JIF” because he built it himself. He was handed the project as a CompuServe employee in 1987; he produced the object, and that was that. The initial document describing how it works? Dead simple. 38 years later, we’re still using the GIF—but it never rose to the same prevalence of JPEG.
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