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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,

But [you] can count the number of sites that actually use [PNG images] on one hand, can't you?

For a set to be counted on one standard human hand, there must be thirty-one or fewer elements (all five fingers up = binary 11111 = 31). Here's a short list; can you think of more?

1. Pinocchio's Brother and redpinocchio (my homepage)
2. Every other site I've designed (can't name them; confidentiality)
3. PNG headquarters
4. League for Programming Freedom
5. Burn All GIFs Day
6. Campaign for Real Ale
7. AuctionBeagle
8. University of Puerto Ricto Institute of Neurobiology
9. Eressea Fantasy PBEM
10. several clip art sites (here or here)

The official MNG page is here, and this is a list of applications which do support MNG. As the article mentions, the GIMP is notable by its absence.

This contains some interesting info on the MNG format, and this shows how MNG compares to other image formats.

The official MNG page is here, and this is a list of applications which do support MNG. As the article mentions, the GIMP is notable by its absence.

This contains some interesting info on the MNG format, and this shows how MNG compares to other image formats.

I know you're all dying to read it...

http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/ spec/draft-mng-lc.html

is it just me, or is it a LOT easier to program a GIF decoder heh.... ah well, the advance of modern technology blah blah.

--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me

There is a mixture of PNG and JPEG called JNG which is supposed to support JPEG compression and an alpha channel. But a short search on the PNG homepage didn't bring any results for me. Maybe if you use a search engine.

In theory, one can simply add an alpha channel to a JPEG file (a second channel for a grayscale or a fourth for a YCbCr color image) -- there is just no software that supports this. The JPEG standard also doesn't say anything about color spaces... Maybe one could wrap the alpha channel into a custom marker. This all makes sense only if it is standardized in some way (so that all major applications support it), which is a very painful and long process. But JPEG2000 is on the way, maybe it adds transparency support of some kind.

I also know Kodak Flashpix, which uses JPEG compression, I don't know about alpha channel support.

[GIF animations a]re as much a part of the web now as HTML. PNG needs animation support.

There's always MNG, a superset of PNG that supports animation. And there's also JavaScript image rotation, which gives quite a bit more power than the simple rotation in the GIF format. But other than on banner ads (which are gradually moving to Macromedia Flash anyway), where do you see a GIF animation anymore? On somebody's lame homepage?

Uncompressed, unencumbered gifs will do just fine

But you also wrote: the tifs take an age to download

If the GIF files were uncompressed, they would take just as long as (or longer than) the TIFF files.

browse a few of the patent documents ... converted them to gifs

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black; the compression behind GIF itself is patented. On the other hand, had you said PNG images...