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Comment by palotasb | Hacker News Reader

Is there a "latest draft" standard available legally and for free for wider audiences? C++, also ISO standardized, does this and I believe it has contributed greatly to its adoption and post-C++11 renaissance. See https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/links#C.2B.2B_Language_and... . For now, JPEG XL might as well be a proprietary closed format for most hackers here.

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Recent drafts do tend to get circulated amongst the image compression community. For wide audiences I don't think this type of document is very readable nor relevant; the number of people who are going to make their own independent implementation is relatively small. In this sense the spec audience is not quite the same as that of a spec for a programming language, which is important not just for compiler implementers but also for programmers in general.

That said, I do hope that ISO will change its policy to put specs behind a paywall.

Any chance of publishing the spec with ECMA in addition to ISO? The C# spec is both an ECMA and an ISO standard, but it started with ECMA.

As one of the authors of the spec, I would be open to also publishing it with another standardization organization that makes specs publicly available, if the legal issues can somehow be sorted out. I think the other spec authors would also be open to that. We certainly have no desire to have a spec that is behind a paywall; that is just the way ISO operates, unfortunately.

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