Hacker News Reader

…if we had a lossy image format with an alpha channel…

Just what I thought last time this came up. Built it. No one came.

http://jim.studt.net/jpeg-alpha/

(I haven't looked at that code in 18 months, but it explores some options and lets you have JPEG images with alpha channels in your browser.)

View on HN

I've actually used this technique before. You can also use an SVG clip path to do something similar in Firefox. When I used this technique I shipped the mask as a separate file as I wasn't familiar enough with the file format to realize I could attach it. The 63KB limit when attaching the mask to the image might be too close.

If you make an app that can take a PNG and convert it to JPEG with alpha channel can you let me know? I would be VERY interested in this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com