Let’s start with some history. Back in the mists of time, when the web was new and we used giant glass particle accelerators for monitors, there were no real standards for color on web pages. If you made something blue on a web page, then you could probably depend on your users seeing something blueish, but that was about as good as it got. There was no consistency between monitors. You could post images, but some people would see them as too dark and some people would see them as too light. Since there were no standards, so no one could really claim that the way that they saw things was “right.”
By the early 2000s, two parallel developments converged:
LCD displays took over from CRTs, and most LCD displays standardized on a single color standard called sRGB, which was closely related to HDTV’s color standard.The “plain” HDTV color standard is called Rec. 709; sRGB uses the same colors but a somewhat different gamma curve.
Monitor color profiling became more common and the tooling for ICC color profiles grew up. Photographers got to know color standards and could mostly get consistent color across systems, if both systems had manually-profiled monitors. Safari added color profile support early. This allowed you to take JPEGs and say “this is sRGB” or “this is AdobeRGB”, or any other color system. Unfortunately, this ended up being really problematic – it meant that Safari and non-Safari users would see vastly different views of the same webpages when images had ICC tags attached to them. Since a large fraction of photographers and web designers use Macs, this meant that there was a flood of “this looks good on my system, why are users complaining that it’s ugly” problems. The “fix” was to publish everything as implicitly sRGB and to omit color tags entirely. Then almost all users would see roughtly the same thing.I mean, assuming that they hasn’t fiddled with the color settings of their monitor, and that the monitor vendor hadn’t boosted the colors to sell better when viewed side-by-side in a store, and that the devices used the same gamma setting, which annoyingly varied between Apple and the PC world. Still, it was much better than what had come before.
Some time before 2010, the web basically converged onto “sRGB is the default”, and tribal knowledge said that there was no point in actually using color tags in images online. Just make everything sRGB, ignore profiles, and move along with your life.
This worked, but it annoyed photographers. Unfortunately, sRGB isn’t a great choice for color photography. It has a relatively narrow gamut; it can’t actually represent most of the greens that people can see. It’s also not a great space for editing pictures.Averaging two numerical color values in sRGB doesn’t quite give you the visual result that you’d expect all the time.
So the usual color-managed photography workflow was to edit images in some ideal, large-gamut color profile, then save “real” images in a wider-gamut space like AdobeRGB, and finally export an 8-bit JPEG in sRGB for sharing online.
But, while it wasn’t ideal, it was Good Enough. So, I stopped paying attention to colors on the web 15 years ago. Just about everyone else did too.
So I was kind of shocked to discover recently that this had all quietly changed over the past few years. We’re almost at a point where we can (and should) retire sRGB, at least for photography and video.

scottstuff.net

The web has quietly moved beyond sRGB over the past few years, and it's now practical to publish HDR and wide-gamut images and video online. Modern displays (especially 4K TVs and Apple devices), cameras, browsers, and image formats like AVIF and JPEG XL all support HDR natively. The main bottleneck is no longer browsers or hardware but server-side tooling — image resizers, CMS platforms, and apps like Hugo, Immich, Slack, and YouTube's HDR transcoder still strip or ignore color profiles. The post explains color spaces (sRGB, Rec. 709, Rec. 2020, Rec. 2100, Display P3), why 8-bit JPEG/PNG fall short for HDR, how gain maps offer a JPEG workaround, and recommends AVIF + JPEG as the practical 2026 format pairing. Rec. 2100/HLG or PQ is suggested as the target color space going forward.

The End of SRGB Is Neigh: HDR Images and Video on the Web in 2026

What is this whole “color space” thing?

Why isn’t 8-bit color good enough for HDR?

Why aren’t JPEG or PNG good enough for HDR?

If sRGB is out, then which color space should I use?