Why can’t JPEGS be transparent?
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All these answers suck to the core, with complete disrespect to the history of image formats.
JPEG came out in 1992 and was produced by digital cameras, so there’s no need for JPEG to support transparency. Computers support JPEG merely because people needed to view and edit their JPEG photos shot by the cameras. Then why nobody added transparency to JPEG format? Because shortly thereafter in 1995, the PNG image format was released and it supports transparency perfectly. So people who need transparency, just use PNG images. For transparent web graphics, people also extensively GIF images as it supports transparency.
The people who own JPEG format didn’t add transparency to JPEG until the year 2000 when they called the new format JPEG2000. So why don’t we have transparent JPEG after the year 2000? Because the JPEG2000 format costs money to use. Microsoft and Apple would have to pay big money to support JPEG2000, so really they just didn’t a damn. In the end, JPEG2000 lost the race, and PNG sticks to nowadays since PNG is patent-free.
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