That would be a layered image format, like .psd (Photoshop).
It's an interesting idea, memes could become editable :)
In the alt-text case specifically, you could allow for optional styling info so that the gloss can be laid out as a visual replacement for the original text that was on the page. But that's not really necessary, and might even be counterproductive to some use-cases (like when interpretation of the meaning of the text depends on details of typography/calligraphy that can't be conveyed by the gloss, and so the user needs to see the original text with the gloss side-by-side; or when the gloss is a translation and the original is written with poetic meter, such that the user wants the gloss for understanding the words but the original for appreciating the poesy of the work.)
Concrete use-cases:
• the "cleaner" and "layout" roles in the (digitally-distributed) manga localization process, only continue to exist, because soft-subbed images (as standalone documents) aren't a thing. Nobody who has any respect for art wants to be "destructively restoring" an artist's original work and vision, just to translate some text within that work. They'd much rather be able to just hand you the original work, untouched, with some translation "sticky notes" on top, that you can toggle on and off.
• in the case of webcomic images that have a textual "bonus joke" (e.g. XKCD, Dinosaur Comics), where this is currently implemented as alt/title-attribute text — this could be moved into the image itself as a whole-image annotation, such that the "bonus joke" would be archivally preserved alongside the image document.
“The Plain Text Extension contains textual data and the parameters necessary to render that data as a graphic, in a simple form. The textual data will be encoded with the 7-bit printable ASCII characters. Text data are rendered using a grid of character cells defined by the parameters in the block fields. Each character is rendered in an individual cell. The textual data in this block is to be rendered as mono-spaced characters, one character per cell, with a best fitting font and size.”
“The Comment Extension contains textual information which is not part of the actual graphics in the GIF Data Stream. It is suitable for including comments about the graphics, credits, descriptions or any other type of non-control and non-graphic data.”
I hesitate to say GIF89a "supported" it since in practice approximately zero percent of software can use either extension. `gIFt` was dropped from the PNG spec for this reason: https://w3c.github.io/PNG-spec/extensions/Overview.html#DC.g...
If it had been well-supported we might have avoided the whole GIF pronunciation war. Load up http://cd.textfiles.com/arcadebbs/GIFS/BOB-89A.GIF in http://ata4.github.io/gifiddle/ and check out the last frame :)
It would, at least, create a codec-neutral location and format for image metadata, with codec-neutral (and ideally extensible + vendor-namespaced) fields. EXIF is just a JPEG thing. There is a reason that TIFF is still to this day used in medical imaging — it allows embedding of standardized medical-namespace metadata fields.
Also, presuming the container format itself is extensible, it would also allow the PNG approach to ancillary data embedding ("allow optional chunks with vendor-specific meanings, for data that can be useful to clients, but which image processors can know it's safe to strip without understanding because 'is optional' is a syntactic part of the chunk name") to be used with arbitrary images — in a way where those chunks can even survive the image being transcoded! (If you're unaware, when you transcode a video file between video codecs using e.g. Handbrake, ancillary data like thumbnail and subtitle tracks will be ported as-is to the new file, as long as the new container format also supports those tracks.)
Also, speaking of subtitle tracks, here's something most people may have never considered: you know how video containers can embed "soft" subtitle tracks? Why shouldn't images embed "soft" subtitle tracks, in multiple languages? Why shouldn't you expect your OS screen-reader feature to be able to read you your accessibility-enabled comic books in your native language — and in the right order (an order that, for comic books, a simple OCR-driven text extraction could never figure out)?
(There are community image-curation services that allow images to be user-annotated with soft subtitles; but they do it by storing the subtitle data outside of the image file, in a database; sending the subtitle data separately as an XHR response after the image-display view loads; and then overlaying the soft-subtitle interaction-regions onto the image using client-side Javascript. Which makes sense in a world where users are able to freely edit the subtitles... but in a world where the subtitles are burned into the image at publication time by the author or publisher, it should be the browser [or other image viewer] doing this overlaying! Saving the image file should save the soft subtitles along with it! Just like when right-click-Save-ing a <video> element!)