More than 16-bit per color channel (bis repetita)

Hello everyone,

A few years ago, I asked about having more than 16-bit per channel in
PNG (as per the spec currently):
https://sourceforge.net/p/png-mng/mailman/message/31397901/

I had a lot of cool answers, which I understand. Years later I come
back with a slightly different approach. GIMP 2.10, on which I
contribute, will get high bit depth, allowing artists/designers/anyone
to work on 32-bit, if not 64-bit per channel. We have our own native
format XCF to store this data, but there is also the OpenRaster format
(http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/OpenRaster/) meant to be
the standard raster format.

Even though the format of data (layers, etc.) is not clearly specific
for the moment, implementers use PNG right now. As more image editing
programs are going into high bit depth, it won't be possible to keep
using PNG for work data, and we will have either to switch to another
internal format, or allow PNG to embed more data. :-)

So is PNG with more than 16-bit per channel still out of the table?

>From the answers, I got in the last thread, I guess you consider PNG
mostly as a finale output format, while obviously we want to use its
feature for "work" data, where high bit depth makes more sense.
Couldn't PNG happily be used for all use cases? :-)

Thanks!

Jehan

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