Absolutely. Simply unscrewing the Huffman stage from the bottom of JPEG and replacing it with a more effective, modern lossless stage kills webp's gains and does not incur in generation loss - the image is pixel accurate to the source jpeg.

You'll probably know this already, but Brunsli made it into the JPEG XL standard. I'm quite happy about it!

JPEG XL uses this new ANS coding as e.g. zstd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_numeral_systems

What has AOMedia to do with this? That alliance is what has made AV1 (and thus AVIF), which is clearly superior to JPEG. AOMedia had nothing to do with WebP (though Google is a member, and WebP is based on VP8, and AV1 is based in part on VP9 which was the successor to VP8).

Is it better? The AVIF examples in the article look even worse than the WebP ones

At 30% reduced size. The true comparison would be at the same file size, which format is able to squeeze more perceivable information into the same bucket?

Indeed. The article's comparisons seem a bit useless - neither the quality or the filesize is kept constant.

I thought the JPEG people were supposed to have JPEG XL [1] out by now, and it was supposed to be the open standard for JPEG's next generation. Anyone know what's happening there?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Photographic_Experts_Gro...

Yes, here's an update: https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_jpeg_xl_compares_to_other_im...

TL;DR: We're now at "Draft International Standard" stage; soon we'll enter "Final Draft International Standard" stage and at that point the bitstream is effectively frozen and adoption can start. The officially ISO-published International Standard will take until first half of 2021, but the codec should be ready to use before that.

Do you mean the Alliance for Open Media? WebP was created solely by Google years about AOM was founded.