Slashdot Mirror

It's always good when the submitted story is more up-to-date than the site it links to. The current press release" on the site is dated August, 2000.

Could this story be submitted by an insider? Hmmm... I know, I know, Slashdot != "investigative journalism"

According to this pdf,
the report compares 4 compression codecs, and found for a small sample found:

MEAN LOSSLESS COMPRESSION RATIOS (big is good)
------------------
JPEG 2000: 2.5
JPEG-LS: 2.98
L-JPEG: 2.09
PNG: 3.52

JPEG-LS is was usually the best, but PNG had a few really good sample that pushed its average up. Actually, these outliers appear important, because that is what really separates the codecs on this metric.

Lossless Decoding Times, relative to JPEG-LS (big is bad)
-----------------
JPEG 2000: 4.3
JPEG-LS: 1
L-JPEG: .9
PNG: 1.2

This doesn't make JPG2K appear too impressive. What it does offer, however, is features. Like Region Of Interest (ROI) coding, good lossy compression, random access, and other goodies that some people may really care about. The report claims that png doesn't do lossy encoding, which is news to me, but it does appear to be one of their major selling points for jpeg-2000 over png.

Damn, that was a good post. I'm keeping a copy of it.

Thanks, that's nice to hear. :) I'm keeping a copy too, and maybe one day I'll make a website from it. It's good to know that people actually find it interesting. These are all important things, but unfortunately most of web designers don't care about them. When my Lynx or Galeon can't render a website which I absolutely have to see (and it's the only place with the information I need), I can always use Netscape and everything is fine (except for microsoft.com which usually crash my Netscape for some reason). But there are people who can't use Netscape or Internet Explorer on their Braille terminal or speech synthesiser and they are effectively unable to use most of the Web. That's very sad. We have 21st century, all the informations they need are there on-line, but they can't reach them because of web designers ignorance. There are no borders for them other than ignorance of web designers.

Web Pages That Suck is a great site for learning about good design through bad design.

Very good one, I didn't know it before. It reminded me ESR's HTML Hell Page: How not to design junk Web pages. I see it has changed a lot in the last few years since I last saw it. Now there are many things from my post (or maybe in my post there are many things from HTML Hell), but I'll still tell you about it even if it makes my comment less insightful. ;) So, the HTML Hell Page is surely worth reading, there are also links to other similar websites:

Here's a list of gripes similar to this one. And there's a fine rant about web page design by C. J. Silverio. Horrible Examples of bad technique are listed at Web Pages That Suck. Jakob Nielsen's column Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design is very good. The Yale Style Guide is worth reading.

I haven't seen all of the above links yet, but I'm sure they're interesting.

Regarding disabled access, try Bobbie as your automatic checker.

Thanks. I knew about it, but I forgot the name. It's a great tool. But there's one thing I don't like about Bobby, it's the license:

"No Reverse Engineering. Licensee shall not modify, adapt, translate, prepare derivative works from, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive source code from the Licensed Software or documentation therefor, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation. Licensee shall not remove, obscure, or alter any copyright notices, trademark notices, or other proprietary rights notices affixed to or contained within the Licensed Software or documentation."

"License Fee. Licensee shall pay CAST or its designee a license fee for each simultaneous user of the Licensed Software ("Single User License Fee") or each server on which it shall install the Licensed Software ("Server License Fee") as set forth at http://www.cast.org/bobby/DownloadBobby316.cfm."

They say on the main page:

"Bobby was created by CAST to help Web page authors identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

"Center for Applied Special Technology, CAST is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology."

"Above, you can test a Web page using our server version of Bobby Worldwide. This server version gives you a preview of the downloadable version of Bobby Worldwide."

But the downloadable version costs:

Single User copy: $99.00
Site License of server version: $3,000.00 per server
Multiple server site license: $2,000.00 per server for 5 or more servers

I think it's exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software. Yes, I'm a free software freak, so in my opinion every software is exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software...

But this is software made by "a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology".

I could tell my employer:
-- Hey, maybe we could install Bobby on the servers?
-- What's that?
-- It's a program to expand opportunities for people with disabilities.
-- Does it cost anything?
-- It's free-as-in-beer.
-- Sure, why not.
but when I tell him that it'll cost him $3k per server... You know what the answer would be even if we only need a single user copy for 100 bucks.

Bobby would serve its purpose much better if it was released as a free software. I'd be proud to contribute patches to Bobby, as I'm sure would lots of other people, and best of all, much more people would use Bobby. If there is any place for proprietary software, it's not software which "was created [...] to help [...] identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

In other words: great idea, fatal license.

Keep graphics content (hence download time) low, and always compress images using Gifbot or something similar.

Good point, it's a very important thing which I didn't say about at all. I noticed that I wait the same time for the average website to load today on 768kb/s DSL, as I waited few years ago on 28.8kb/s modem.

I didn't know Gifbot. It's great, because people who don't understand the image compression techniques (i.e. most of people making personal webpages) can improve ther graphics and save time and bandwidth. It only lacks PNG output which is important to me, not only because of the GIF problems, but because it's a great format, even recommended by The World Wide Web Consortium and it has Adam7 interlacing feature for great progressive loading on slow connections, very good for the WWW (see this image or this one if your connection is to fast to notice the effect), read more about Adam7 interlacing on stl.caltech.edu Introduction to PNG.

What I would add about the graphics is to first of all, always use JPEG for photographs, and always use PNG for computer generated graphics (logos, headers, text, screenshots). Of course there are sitiations when it's better to use PNG for photo or JPEG for something generated (like rendered landscapes), but for most of situations (especially for usual homepages) this rule works great: JPEG for photos, PNG for logos.

People sometimes use JPEG for flat few-color logos, which looks terrible on the hard edges and solid color areas. People also (however not so often) use PNG or GIF to save photos, and they are ten times larger than JPEG of the same quality.

My personal choice for editing web graphics is The Gimp, it's a great tool especially for web designing purposes. It has a great JPEG saving dialog, where you can set different quality values and see the real-time preview, so you can save at the lowest quality (highest compression) when you don't see the difference, You can also set subsampling type or DCT method and restart markers for more advanced users.

I almost forgot! See the Cooltext.com:

"Cooltext.com is an online graphics generator for web pages and anywhere else you might need an impressive logo without a lot of work. We provides real-time generation of graphics customized exactly the way you want them.

Simply choose what kind of image you would like to create. Then, fill out a form and you'll have your own images created on the fly.

Cooltext.com will always be available for use free of charge."

They use Gimp as the backend so it's a great introduction to Gimp power as a web graphics authoring tool. Everyone should check out Cooltext, you can make great logos in few seconds. Great for lazy webmasters who want to have nice websites with no effort. Great preview of Gimp.

Speaking about the software, another great tool I use daily is ImageMagick. The best set of programs I've seen for conversion, optimizing and compression of lots of pictures at the same time. Once I used it to automatically scale, stretch contrast, add logos, compress and save over 10,000 pictures. It took over two days to my PC back then, but it was two days of rest for me. It would've taken me weeks if I'd had to do it manually.

Important links: PNG home, PNG at W3C, JPEG home, JPEG at W3C, The Gimp, Cooltext, ImageMagick.

Great, I wrote another comment for ten screens, while I should work instead... But what can I do, when I have a subject which is one of the main areas of my interest? Actually I didn't realize that I have so much to say about web design, maybe I should write a book, teach or something... It reminds me a funny situation I had few months ago:

A friend of mine phoned me once and asked:
-- Tell me, how do you make websites?
I saw all of my life scrolling before my eyes. I was trying to figure out where to start my answer, and after ten seconds of my silence, he said:
-- But hurry up, I'm using a cell phone.
Here I started to laugh like a mad man, and I couldn't explain him why I laughed when he kept asking me, because I couldn't stop laughing.

He really thought that I could explain everything to him in few minutes... Later I told him, that I had been learning how to make websites for many years, and now he's proud that he's the man who asked me to summarize many years of my life in few minutes. I tried to give him few books but he thought it'd be faster and even when I suggested Netscape Composer, it wasn't worth the effort for him... :) Great story, I always laugh when I remember it.

That's about it. I say again, Damn that was a good post. 5++ (Moderators please mod original post up).

Thanks once again. It's good to know that there's someone who likes it more than the moderators. :)

From the last minute: I just found The greatest WWW page ever!

No one is ever going to use Ogg anything except for uber-geek OSS zealots. I know I sure as hell am not converting 1000 MP3s into .oggs anytime soon. Nor am I going to use their slow-ass encoder to encode new music.

The standard response is "I won't use Ogg Vorbis, because it's not popular enough" or "I won't use Ogg Vorbis, because I have already so many MP3s". People seem to forget that they can have MP3 files and Ogg Vorbis files.

I remember when the best file format for photos available was GIF. That time when I digitalized a photo I stored it as a GIF file. But when I first heard about JPEG, I didn't say "it's nice but not popular". I didn't also say that "I have lots of GIFs and I don't want to convert them". I just started saving the new pictures in JPEG format, leaving the old GIFs alone. Now I have converted those old files to PNG, because of problems with Unisys, but I didn't have to do it, I had been using old GIFs and new JPEGs for many years.

We're not talking here about which audio format do you want to store your ripped CDs in. We're not even talking about which video codec do the corporations and artists want to use to publish their movies and streaming video (which by the way, is a matter of saving milions of dollars). I'm not talking about Ogg Vorbis vs. MPEG-1/2 audio layer 3 -- I'm talking about Ogg Tarkin vs. MPEG-4, in the terms of license and in the context of free software. Maybe read what I said:

Remember that even 1/100 of cent per codec makes it impossible to implement as free software. If you write a free software encoder and ten milions of people will start using it, will you just pay $2.5M to MPEG-4 guys, begging people to stop using it in more copies?

What about all the patents related to jpeg2000 and mpeg4?

ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 Working Group 1, better known as the Joint Photographic Experts Group, developed the JPEG bitstream standard (part of IS 10918-1), the SPIFF (.jpg) file format (IS 10918-3), and a new "JPEG 2000" wavelet coding system. JPEG has a policy of requiring all members to license patents royalty-free if the patent is essential for implementing the standard.

On the other hand, MPEG has more lenient standards, requiring members to pool and license their patents on a "reasonable and non-discriminatory basis," but not recognizing that a "non-discriminatory" policy toward Free Software implies royalty-free redistribution.

What about all the patents related to jpeg2000 and mpeg4?

ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 Working Group 1, better known as the Joint Photographic Experts Group, developed the JPEG bitstream standard (part of IS 10918-1), the SPIFF (.jpg) file format (IS 10918-3), and a new "JPEG 2000" wavelet coding system. JPEG has a policy of requiring all members to license patents royalty-free if the patent is essential for implementing the standard.

On the other hand, MPEG has more lenient standards, requiring members to pool and license their patents on a "reasonable and non-discriminatory basis," but not recognizing that a "non-discriminatory" policy toward Free Software implies royalty-free redistribution.

What about all the patents related to jpeg2000 and mpeg4?

ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29 Working Group 1, better known as the Joint Photographic Experts Group, developed the JPEG bitstream standard (part of IS 10918-1), the SPIFF (.jpg) file format (IS 10918-3), and a new "JPEG 2000" wavelet coding system. JPEG has a policy of requiring all members to license patents royalty-free if the patent is essential for implementing the standard.

On the other hand, MPEG has more lenient standards, requiring members to pool and license their patents on a "reasonable and non-discriminatory basis," but not recognizing that a "non-discriminatory" policy toward Free Software implies royalty-free redistribution.

Pr0n comes in .jpg format, not PNG. Therefore, PNG is dead. Wait for JPEG 2000

No, the trick is that a picture is worth 1000 words. Since graphics usually compress worse than text (limited dictionary)

The latest wavelet compression techniques can compress a good-sized color image to 8 kilobytes, or the size of a thousand English words plus light markup.

JPEG2000 copy control is described in the document JPEG2000 requirements and profiles version 6.3 under section 5.8 Security, p.12, published in July 2000.

The JPEG2000 copy control requirements were apparently added only recently as part of the application requirements but the wider goal is to "ensure that appropriate tools and technologies are adopted in JPEG2000 standard to fullfil [the requirements]". They are not mentioned at all in the full draft ISO/IEC specification Final CD published on 16th March 2000.

JPEG2000 copy control is described in the document JPEG2000 requirements and profiles version 6.3 under section 5.8 Security, p.12, published in July 2000.

The JPEG2000 copy control requirements were apparently added only recently as part of the application requirements but the wider goal is to "ensure that appropriate tools and technologies are adopted in JPEG2000 standard to fullfil [the requirements]". They are not mentioned at all in the full draft ISO/IEC specification Final CD published on 16th March 2000.

1. It's too early to criticise The Gimp for not supporting JPEG2000 because the JPEG2000 image standard has not been finalised. To quote the Final CD from the official JPEG2000 website,

• "anyone implementing software according to the description available in this FCD, risks not being compliant with the final JPEG2000 International Standard (IS), which is due to be published some time in 2001 as IS15444-1.

2. Another important issue (stated here) is that the royalty-free fee-free JPEG2000 patent licenses may apply only to conforming implementations. One such requirement of conforming implementations is to have copy control implemented including methods

• 1) To protect access to the image
• 2) To identify the image, source or owner in a secure way that cannot be removed by unauthorised parties.
• 3) To indicate integrity (images that are not allowed to be edited).

It is not clear how the patent holders will interpret these requirements for open-source implementations that want to use a GPL license (as for Gimp) which requires the whole software to be modifiablefor any purpose, potentially in ways which could violate the conformance requirements.

--William

1. It's too early to criticise The Gimp for not supporting JPEG2000 because the JPEG2000 image standard has not been finalised. To quote the Final CD from the official JPEG2000 website,

• "anyone implementing software according to the description available in this FCD, risks not being compliant with the final JPEG2000 International Standard (IS), which is due to be published some time in 2001 as IS15444-1.

2. Another important issue (stated here) is that the royalty-free fee-free JPEG2000 patent licenses may apply only to conforming implementations. One such requirement of conforming implementations is to have copy control implemented including methods

• 1) To protect access to the image
• 2) To identify the image, source or owner in a secure way that cannot be removed by unauthorised parties.
• 3) To indicate integrity (images that are not allowed to be edited).

It is not clear how the patent holders will interpret these requirements for open-source implementations that want to use a GPL license (as for Gimp) which requires the whole software to be modifiablefor any purpose, potentially in ways which could violate the conformance requirements.

--William

1. It's too early to criticise The Gimp for not supporting JPEG2000 because the JPEG2000 image standard has not been finalised. To quote the Final CD from the official JPEG2000 website,

• "anyone implementing software according to the description available in this FCD, risks not being compliant with the final JPEG2000 International Standard (IS), which is due to be published some time in 2001 as IS15444-1.

2. Another important issue (stated here) is that the royalty-free fee-free JPEG2000 patent licenses may apply only to conforming implementations. One such requirement of conforming implementations is to have copy control implemented including methods

• 1) To protect access to the image
• 2) To identify the image, source or owner in a secure way that cannot be removed by unauthorised parties.
• 3) To indicate integrity (images that are not allowed to be edited).

It is not clear how the patent holders will interpret these requirements for open-source implementations that want to use a GPL license (as for Gimp) which requires the whole software to be modifiablefor any purpose, potentially in ways which could violate the conformance requirements.

--William

Jpeg 2000

Maybe you should look at some different samples. Wavelet image compression is impressive. Check out JPEG 2000 for what is bound to become the next big standard.

So everything is spiffy :)

http://www.jpeg.org/JPEG2000.htm

This is the jpeg.org website for the JPEG2000 specs. It contains articles about the format, etc...

-S

Scott Ruttencutter

Here are some quotes from an article about JPEG2000:

Since August of 1998, a team within the Digital Imaging Group (DIG) has been developing a rich file format for JPEG 2000

It surely took a long time to develop it. I hope it's worth it.

Image authors will also have the option of saving the picture in lossless format for archival storage

This is great! It means I no longer need to keep all of these uncomressed BMP files lying around.

Wavelet technology also provides for a continuous download stream of data that allows the user to control the amount of image resolution desired

This is also great. If I understand it correctly, it will allow you to download 30% of the image and get 30% of the quality, download %50 and get 50% quality or download it all and get full quality. But I might be mistaken.

Another innovation is that a new standard, "sRGB" will be the default colorspace for this format. In the current JPEG standard, there is no notion of default colorspace. This lack of precision contributes to inconsistent JPEG color rendering

This is a Good Thing, too. Great for printing.

The JPEG 2000 standard for metadata also provides for extensibility of the metadata properties. In other words, new functionality can be added without having to rewrite the standard. And speaking of adding information, the metadata catalog can be modified without having to rewrite the entire image file. These abilities make for a very nimble, adaptable image file format

Well, we don't seem to need this (using different formats is easier). If the format is too extensible, it can lead to the "get-the-latest-viewer-you-moron!" syndrome, like all the problems with the HTML that we have now.

If all goes as planned, the official schedule for implementation will be released in January 2000

Other good links:

JPEG2000 Requirements and profiles document, V.6.0
SEMINAR ON IMAGING SECURITY AND JPEG2000 - this is an interesting collection of documents about digital image security and watermarking. These gyus take security seriously!
JPEG2000 bitstreams - actual .j2k files for your viewing pleasure (I wish a had a viewer :-)
JPEG2000 Decoder (Version 2.3.1) - written in Java, the source is not available yet (it will be)

The JPEG committee page has links to more information regarding this image format. http://www.jpeg.org/public/jpeglinks.htm

Jpeg 2000 might not be finished as of yet, but I suspect that it will have a good chance of being a standard in the future (just as jpeg/mpeg is today), and even greater, it has support for most about anything you'd want. From lossless to lossy compression and a whole range of other nifty things such as wavelets. Read up on it yourself, and then wonder what format you'd like your browser to support in the future...

PNG is a good thing, and has always been a good thing since it arrived, but I fear that it won't ever be a de facto standard. Sure, I want real transparency (GIF? Does masking at best, it's plain silly) and non LZW, but I won't recode any browsers (especially since I am using IE and can't stand Netrape/Mozilla with it's lack of design) nor will I recode any software packages (few of them seem to be able to save PNGs correctly && be of any use). On top of this, will there be a gateway that translates GIFs into PNGs? Because as far as I know, I can't make everyone use PNG...

Once again, I hope those that has invested in JPEG will make use of it, and thus make it widespread.

More information on JPEG 2000 can be found at http://www.jpeg.org.

I am wondering if the IJG is planning to (and has sufficient resources to) implement JPEG 2000 support quickly as the specification finalizes. Does anyone know? I asked Tom Lane about this indirectly a while ago, and he just pointed me to the www.jpeg.org web page.

The IJG did a great job on the current library, and I hope that they can do JPEG2000. I also think that if they need support (manpower/money) it would behoove the OSS comunity to provide it.

If for one agree that wavelet based approaches to compression are the future off lossy continuous tone compression. The MrSID technology for instance is great, but they hold a very tight hold on their proprietary technology. I think it is important to establish a popular, and public format and technology to fill this void or proprietary interests will damage OSS efforts.