As I was teaching my Web Design class today, the unnerving realization slowly dawned on me that I was the only one in the room excited by JPEG compression!

I was introducing my students to the various graphic file formats: GIF, JPEG, PNG, Flash, and so forth. I outlined the comparative advantages of each format, and their proper application. At one point I had a JPEG image of a camel projected on the big screen, zoomed in so close you could see the individual pixels.

“You see?” I gushed. “You see how the JPEG divides the whole image into eight-by-eight squares, like tiny chessboards? That’s how it turned this three-megabyte photograph into an amazingly small 28-kilobyte file! And…”

But then I turned my gaze from the projection screen, to the faces of the students. And that’s when I knew. The JPEG compression algorithm is not cool.