How JPEG XL Became a Global Standard

Google has documented JPEG XL's evolution from earlier projects—Guetzli and Brunsli, which refined the aging JPEG format—through PIK, an experimental codec blending those advances. The final standard, now ISO/IEC 18181, incorporates PIK's decoding approach and Cloudinary's compression techniques. The path shows how open-source research can crystallize into international formats, much as PNG once replaced GIF.