Have you seen this news? Does it means we can use png files for hdr lighting soon? Or there are any hidden restrictions for a complete replacement of .hdr?
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I’m curious about this.. you should try it and let us know! 
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Would this make PNGs unacceptably large for users with metered internet connections?
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I haven’t looked up the updated spec, but expect it to be downward compatible with pre-existing PNGs. So only the usage of the additional features would come with an extra cost in terms of file sizes and computational complexity.
Besides, I also expect it’ll take some time until new PNGs featuring the new properties will become available at all. Plenty of time for the median typical hardware and median network connections to also become more powerful and affordable.
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One note, “HDR” is unfortunately not a well-defined term… The PNG feature seems to be focused on presenting “HDR photos”, more like images on Instagram. That doesn’t mean floating-point data, PNG is (still) ≤16-bit, and has been for a while, even though browsers have only really given JS+WebGL access to the PNG image data at 8-bit precision.
So I suspect that filesize with HDR PNG will be reasonable, but unfortunately, I also somewhat doubt it will be great as an HDR lighting or other floating point data format.
Recent discussion from gamedevs on Mastodon here:
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