Slashdot Mirror

The wrapup of how all browsers do at supporting PNG
A demo of transparent pngs that works in ie for windows

Minor correction: MSIE for Windows hasn't gotten alpha channel right; MSIE 5 for the Mac has near-perfect PNG support (including alpha channels, gamma support, progressive display, etc...) and is highly regarded (along w/Netscape 6/Mozilla) when it comes to proper implementation of the PNG format.

(And yes, it uses libpng).

http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/#history (By the way, despite the implications in some of CompuServe's old press releases and in occasional trade-press articles, PNG's development was not instigated by either CompuServe or the World Wide Web Consortium, nor was it led by them. Individuals from both organizations contributed to the effort, but the PNG development group exists as a separate, Internet-based entity.)

(By the way, despite the implications in some of CompuServe's old press releases and in occasional trade-press articles, PNG's development was not instigated by either CompuServe or the World Wide Web Consortium, nor was it led by them. Individuals from both organizations contributed to the effort, but the PNG development group exists as a separate, Internet-based entity.)

Is PNG the only OS graphics solution than can stand up against GIF and JPEG? It certainly isn't comparible, but maybe events such as these will get the fire going.

I never even heard of Forgent until just now!
well, maybe more software will start to support JNG now. unless 'jpeg network graphics' is a copyright violation.

Actually I believe that it was Compuserve and yes it was GIF. That is the reason that the PNG format (pronounced 'ping') was developed. Besides PNG is technologically superior to GIF. Will it be time to create a patent free alternative to JPEG now?

"MNG (pronounced ``ming''), is short for Multiple-image Network Graphics, as one might gather from the title of this page. Designed with the same modular philosophy as PNG and by many of the same people, MNG is intended to provide a home for all of the multi-image capabilities that have no place in PNG. "

Care to read more?

I thought it was bad recently when a "Critical" IE6 security path completetly broke the ability to view TIFF images in a browser without hacking the registry by hand.

Actually, it was Microsoft dropping support for Netscape plug-ins such as QuickTime 5 because of a patent dispute.

I maintain a web site that basically sells access to TIFF imaged documents.

Adobe TIFF has three common lossless modes: Apple PackBits (RLE algorithm used in MacPaint and at least one NES game), CCITT Fax (a strange bilevel image codec used by fax machines), and Unisys LZW. PNG, on the other hand, uses Phil Katz's Deflate (LZSS on a 32 KB window, followed by Huffman coding), which makes smaller files than any of TIFF's three algorithms.

What does TIFF do that PNG doesn't?

FAQ: http://mozilla.org/start/1.0/faq/

Don't bother looking at these in IE 5.0, its PNG support is rubbish.

You're right that he should not use JPEG for this, but for the wrong reasons. JPEG is simply the wrong format for images that are not like photographs. Specifically, JPEG is not appropriate for images with high spatial frequencies (ie, distinct lines and shapes, and a small number of colors). Raster-based formats (GIF, PNG, TIFF, etc) are the appropriate format for scanned text, diagrams, etc. PNG is not a replacement for JPEG.

Furthermore, if you want animations, you are overlooking the new, cool computer technology called MNG.

The image TechFitsYou.jpg (the bottom of the article) should be saved as a PNG, instead of JPEG (just a 4 or 8 color PNG would look great and would be small, while the highly compressed JPEG looks terrible). The same with the header logo (Header_wireless_everywear.jpg) and the photos (charmit.jpg, CharmITTwiddler146.jpg). If someone knows the webmaster, please tell her/him about it, because it looks very unprofessional. And while I believe that they know the technology and I can believe them about this product, if I hadn't read the Slashdot comments I wouldn't be so sure. Thanks.

Although jpg compression is definitely helpful, the article forgets to mention that two image formats are supported by all browsers. GIF being the second.

In addition, 4.0 and newer browsers support Portable Network Graphics (PNG).

GIFs should be used for vector based graphics

No they shouldn't. Use PNG for still images. Use SWF (now an open format) or MNG (not much browser support yet but works in Mozilla and Konqueror) for animations.

and provides a better overall quality/size advantage when done right.

PNG can be 10% smaller than GIF when crushed properly.

http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngapbr.html#msie-wi n-unix

Or perhaps you are using a Mac? Mac IE does alpha transparency fine, and it is rumoured to be in general a much superior product to the Windows version.

PNG's alpha channel was never utilized because Microsoft never fully supported it. Variable transparency could be very useful except that it wouldn't work in the most commonly used browser.

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!

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!

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!

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?

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?

I belive the standard response whenever this question comes up (once a week or so it seems) is :

There cannot be support for Ogg Vorbis in a hardware device until someone writes an integer-only decoder. These units do not have FPUs.

• No, and there also aren't any that support MIDI. What's your point? Unpopular technology doesn't tend to be supported by vendors and idealism is utterly meaningless when it throws money away -- welcome to the real world.
• I can't understand why you think a company would spend money on adding support for that format unless it would be a selling point. (...) The vast majority of my linux using friends still use mp3, and you can bet almost no one in the windows world uses ogg.
• I don't use Ogg Vorbis. I think I looked into it a while back, but I spent too long ripping all my CDs to switch. That's the real issue.
• Ogg is _NOT_ better then MP3 from a market standpoint. Every 6 months there will be some new format that improves the compression and sound quality. (...) MP3 is good enough, and it is here to stay.

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.

So your response is quite unique, in the sense that you're talking about technical aspects. But the lack of FPU is not so hard problem.

When I had 386SX I was writing programs with floating point operations, but I didn't have FPU. At that time, I didn't think about it. Later I found out that my C compiler was emulating the floating point instructions using the standard, integer-only 80386 CPU.

There are generally two ways of using real numbers without FPU:

• Emulate the floating point arithmetic, or
• use the fixed point arithmetic.

Why use LZW for GIFs when the PNG image format is so much better? PNG has better compression, a better license, and more features!

Because PNG doesn't support animation, and unlike Mozilla, IE doesn't support MNG (the animated variant of PNG). To check for MNG support in your browser, head over to this page.

Try using png images with alpha transparency sometime. Note that Mozilla/Netscape and Opera render them perfectly.

From the official PNG home page:

The quality of PNG support in applications varies widely, but overall it is improving at a reasonable rate.

The "varies widely" part terrifies the web designer in me.

I just tried the PNG Test Icons in IE 5.1 on OS X and they worked fine.

Sheesh. Google is your friend here:

Portable Network Graphics Home Site

Actually, Konqueror does support PNG transparency.

try looking at the offcial PNG transparency test page using Konqueror:
http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngs.html

You can't really compare Konqueror and Galeon because they have different scopes. Konqueror is a file manager that doubles as a web browser. Konqueror, Nautilus, and Internet Explorer have the same scope (although Nautilus's web functions are a bit weak).

They even use PNG-format images, instead of the notoriously closed GIF format so often seen on our own beloved Slashdot.

I only hope that Ogg Vorbis will work on my CPRM-enabled ATA drive...

PNG was supposed to replace GIF because (Unisys?) was going to uphold patents on GIF

Also because PNG is Turbo Studly standard and supposedly unencumbered.

Has anyone even seen a PNG file online? I think I ran across a grand total of 1. Of course there could have been inline graphics that I didn't notice, but really?

Yeah, inline graphics are pretty rare on the web. Plus, some sites are designed to give you PNG if your browser supports OBJECT PNG, and GIF otherwise.

From my mozilla cache:
file * | grep PNG | wc -l = 20
file * | grep GIF | wc -l = 546

Of course, I do spend a lot of time on http://pnggygirls.com.

From Altavista:
image:bmp (348,527 results)
image:png (1,726,036 results)
image:jpg (204,606,124 results)
image:gif (452,012,967 results)

Looks like PNG is kicking BMPs butt!

Nonetheless, PNG is the future, no doubt. In any case, I think they should have put PNG, as well as JPEG screenshots.

-- Don Inodoro

Presently MP3 is the de-facto near-CD-quality audio format. I initially believed Vorbis would fade into obscurity as PNG has, requiring special plug-ins to view. However, the opposite seems to be true. A survey at raw42 revealed that 80.3% of users prefer Ogg Vorbis over MP3 (5.2%). I've beginnning to change my views too, considering that Fraunhofer owns the rights to MP3.

Someone else had a good list, but here is what I'd recommend:

• Looks way flasher (skinnable! most people go after glitz, and Mozilla sure has that - more from themes.org too)
• PNG Alpha support (IE's support is bollocks, have a look at the pictures on libpng.org for examples)
• Zap the popups! (just add the setting to your prefs.js - needs a bit of tech savvy - but that's a big bonus)
• Make adverts not load (right-click on an advert, "Block images from this site")
• Security (no more Nimda biting your bum)

Most Windows users should be interested in those.

And I don't think there's a single browser on the market that fully implements PNG

The png homepage has a pretty good summary of png support in browsers.

Most of these I haven't tried, but Mozilla (incl. Galeon) and Konqueror seem to render my pngs correctly.

If full support includes mng, perhaps you're correct. If you mean full support for alpha transparency and gamma, then you need to find a better browser.

___

the IETF cannot proceed without the permission of Adobe and Xerox because the new standard relies on IP from the two companies.

It doesn't have to. There's always PNG, the latest free replacement for GIF and TIFF.

PNGs don't support animation

Other than banners, what GIF images on popular web sites are animated?

the compression algorithm it uses requires more code (i.e. bigger downloads for its encoder/decoders)

Irrelevant. Opera is small (about 2 MB) and handles PNG. Commercial paint programs such as Photoshop come on CD-ROM; 50 KB for the PNG codec is peanuts compared to the 650 MB CD that the rest of the operating system or paint program comes on or even the 10 MB download of GIMP for Windows. Besides, properly optimized binary code is a very small part of a web browser compared to pre-initialized data such as chrome, skins, themes, or whatever you call appearances.

Sure there's MNG, but it's more of a half-assed Flash implementation than an animated GIF replacement.

MNG has a low-complexity subset with about the same functionality as multiple-image GIF (combine frames, replace frames, wait x milliseconds, loop images).

That would be the MNG format, a branch of PNG.

Amazing what google can do.

The big deal with PNGs is that they offer an alpha channel for transparency. With this, you can have 256 levels of transparency instead of just one (like GIF has). So, a web designer only has to create an image once -- then, it can be used on any background, while still maintaining anti-aliasing.

The main problem, though, is browser support. Support is on the rise -- I mean, even the Sega Dreamcast's web browser fully supports PNG. And, Mozilla supports PNGs nicely (alpha transparency and all). But, IE 5 (on PC) doesn't cooperate (IE 5 on Mac supports PNG swimmingly). Hopefully, IE 6 will remedy this. Once the majority of web users are browsing with IE 6, Mozilla, or another PNG-supporing-browser, PNGs may be very enticing to web designers.

The big deal with PNGs is that they offer an alpha channel for transparency. With this, you can have 256 levels of transparency instead of just one (like GIF has). So, a web designer only has to create an image once -- then, it can be used on any background, while still maintaining anti-aliasing.

The main problem, though, is browser support. Support is on the rise -- I mean, even the Sega Dreamcast's web browser fully supports PNG. And, Mozilla supports PNGs nicely (alpha transparency and all). But, IE 5 (on PC) doesn't cooperate (IE 5 on Mac supports PNG swimmingly). Hopefully, IE 6 will remedy this. Once the majority of web users are browsing with IE 6, Mozilla, or another PNG-supporing-browser, PNGs may be very enticing to web designers.

I'll admit up front that I haven't read the article - the comments already posted about it tell me that it's probably a waste of time. The theme, apparently, is that "geeks" are preventing the internet from being a spiffy, flashy experience. Obviously, that's ignorant foolishness. Not only would getting geeks out of the 'net not make it prettier, it would prevent the continued development of the "Rich Experience®" that the marketroids are pushing...:

• MNG for animated graphics
  
• PNG for still images
• Ogg Vorbis for sound and music
• Icecast for "Internet Radio"
• PHP for dynamic web page generation
• (Not to mention PERL for the same sort of thing!)
• The Infrastructure to deliver all this stuff affordably in the first place (too many links to post! OS's, servers, etc...)

And I'm certain there are plenty more examples people could add to this list...

Rubbish. Believe it or not the web extends beyond the borders of your country.

Wherever there's Disney, there's perpetual copyright. The Walt Disney Company buys puppet politicians in every major country and, every 20 years, lobbies for another 20-year extension to all subsisting copyrights.

But that's beside the point. The point I was trying to make was that web sites have to buy their content somewhere. Not only that, but they also have to pay Unisys for a license to display animated banner ads, as the patent-free alternative only works in recent Mozilla builds.

These delayed-action patent issues are becoming predictable. The community ought to keep its collective eyes out for this in the future. While not exactly the same, the similarities are striking:

1. gif/unisys/lzw Unisys waits until the file format is literally covering the world, and then threatens lawsuits.
2. Rambus We've been using SDRAM for how long, and they're just waking up to the idea that they have patents on it?
3. CDDB Don't worry, it's "free." Right. Sure.
4. Now, Fraunhofer ...

We should all be experienced enough with this phenomenon to see it coming a mile away. From this perspective, things like Windows Media are not competitors to mp3, they are just different complainants in the patent lawsuits.

I strenuously suggest people use png, .ogg, and anything other technology that isn't trying to strangle open standards.

The Internet wouldn't have existed if they played by these rules at the beginning.

Steve

The article has it about right. Png is vastly superior - excellent lossless compression, sometimes better than lossy methods (plus technical features like a full alpha channel), and, most importantly for its dominance over gif, it is unencumbered by patents or closed source algorithms.

Speed of compression is not a factor in compression - otherwise we would use bmps or xpms, which have zero compression time - because they're uncompressed. Size matters. Speed doesn't.

I really can't see much market, and very little application for this compression. On-the-fly compression of images for web download would be redundant, since a png would be smaller than this format, so the speedy on-the-fly compression of uncompressed images is pointless.

And in any case, modern PCs are more than powerful enough to almost transparently display well compressed images, so a simpler format is about 10 years out of time.

If it was open source, it could perhaps have a market in replacing things like xpms, which are used in games for processing speed, but even it was, the benefit would be marginal, since hard disk space is, relative to image size, almost infinite, so compressing them slightly wouldn't make much difference - and for download those images would be gzipped anyway.

Don't use GIF. Use a small PNG file instead (provided you have a 4.0 or later browser).
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

I'm using Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.2.16 i686; en-US; m17) Gecko/20000806. It does crash when scrolling fast over the page. That was my first Mozilla crash today. Thank you for posting.. :)

here i whore
google.com:"burn all gifs" | gnu.org:"Why no GIFs" | programming-freedom.org:"GIF Controversy" | google:"league no gifs" | libPNG.org:"PNG Home Site"
here i bird
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

Oddly, IE5.0 on the Mac renders PNGs correctly.

Typical greedy bloody Micros~1, always adding new features to embrace and extend, without fixing things that are known to currently be broken.

M17 schedule: I checked the Mozilla milestones page on Sunday before beginning the article and again Monday morning (3am PDT) just before submitting it; it claimed M17 would branch yesterday (26 June) and be on the wire today, and in fact it still says that--although there's now a red comment at the top (dated 27 May 1999!) that M17 won't be out for another couple of weeks. As a side note, I submitted the article with the following comment:

Well, supposedly M17 branches later today and hits the wire tomorrow (ha!)

Unfortunately, it seems that both Jamie and I believed the other person was more informed about the true release date than we actually were. I apologize for the screwup.

Background: Back in April, around the time of the M15 posting, I commented to Jamie about the recent progress in PNG alpha support in browsers and the, shall we say, somewhat uneven accuracy of /. comments w.r.t. PNG and MNG features. He suggested I write something up for the next milestone, and I agreed to do that. Unfortunately, M16 showed up while I was on an extended business trip, so I wrote the article for M17 instead. I assumed it would be posted when M17 actually hit the wire, but it seems we were a bit premature. Oops...

Browsers and alpha support: As other comments have noted, OmniWeb and CscHTML also support full alpha blending, and Webster XL has not been abandoned--it's still under development. I've requested and/or have received screen shots for all three and will post them soon. On the other hand, I've been informed that Konqueror supports only binary (GIF-style) transparency, not full alpha blending. If anyone knows otherwise, please let me know. (I've downloaded a recent binary but am still missing a sufficiently recent libstdc++, I believe.)

Updated article: a corrected version of this article will be permanently available at http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/slas hpng-2000.html. (The page is already there, but I haven't had time to update it yet.)

Hemos: I'm not Hemos, but I play one on TV.

Greg

Could you please contact me and let me know what the earliest alpha-supporting version was that you're completely certain of? I'd also love to add some screen shots of 4.0b3 or 3.1rc2 running on my PNG-alpha test page and the linked MagnoliaAlpha and IceAlpha pages.

Thanks,