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Mozilla has released a new roadmap which includes branch, freeze, and release dates from 0.7 up into 1.x. I'm still hoping support for the Xrender gets in there soon, that and encryption are the 2 things lacking for me (and encryption has worked all right for some of recent versions). Anyway good luck to the actual hackers working on this thing.

jensend writes: "Mozilla's .6 milestone has been reached. This should bring the functionality of Netscape 6 without the marketing stuff and performance hit. Details at Mozilla .6 Release Notes."

jensend writes: "Mozilla's .6 milestone has been reached. This should bring the functionality of Netscape 6 without the marketing stuff and performance hit. Details at Mozilla .6 Release Notes."

Until this week, I've been unconvinced by those who say the U.S. election process needs to be conducted with computers instead of paper, pencil, and punchcards. I've changed my mind. It's time to take a good hard look at our ancient voting system, and bring it up to date. When today's 14-year-olds go to vote in the 2004 elections, will they still take the pencil from the volunteer, slide the punchcard into the molded plastic, and turn the weird knobs? Or will they use the technology they've grown up with?

My change of heart came while listening to an NPR story last night. Election results for one county in Michigan were held up for two hours because some volunteers with ballots were barricaded in the building by a bear. A bear! What century is this?

There are some fair concerns about moving to a more-than-just-dead-trees voting system. We have to consider what the impact will be on voter enfranchisement. A change that makes it possible for the rich to vote by telepathy, for example, while the poor have to drive a hundred miles uphill both ways (to access a non-telepathic voting booth) would not be exactly democratic.

Would it have been fair, in 2000, for the middle class to be able to vote from the comfort of their homes and jobs, while the poor and homeless had to get to a voting booth? I don't know.

But my best guess is that, by 2004, this won't be a question anymore. Plot the percentage of lower-income homes with internet access from 1996 to 2000, and then extrapolate another four years. So if it should be done, how can it be done? There are five key issues to solve: authorization, anonymity, data confidence, UI, and security.

I propose a system in which each voting booth runs a webserver which logs votes (without identification) to two internal media (hard disk and floppy would be good, see below). Once the polls close, each booth's computer can be totalled and sent over the internet to the state's central server.

Meanwhile, any computer that speaks https on the internet would become a voting booth of its own, running slightly different software.

Each state's official results could be in an hour after its polls close. Which beats the ten-day waiting period we have now for our overseas ballots.

Authorization isn't really that hard: When you register to vote, you (by default) get a password delivered by snail-mail a week before the election. Tampering with that mail is a federal offense, of course. On election day you use secure http to sign in from anywhere with your name, address and password. Lose the password? Sorry, you don't get the comfort of home/work; you go to the voting booth with everyone else.

Anonymity is trivial; any logs with identifying information either don't get stored, or get wiped immediately.

Computers crash. Data confidence means the servers write the votes to multiple media: network, hard drive, flash RAM. A dot-matrix printer makes a good emergency backup medium.

This system also needs a dirt-simple GUI for voters connecting from home or work. No butterfly webpages necessary; click a name, and get a confirmation screen that shows you name, party, (importantly) photo, and big "yes" and "no" buttons.

At the voting booth it can be even simpler, using touch-screens.

Security is, of course, always a problem. Secure http effectively eliminates the man-in-the-middle attack, so the main worry are that an attacker will be able to run unauthorized code on a government computer which could (read) correlate my name with my vote or (write) change my vote. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that a completely open-sourced system, from the kernel up, combined with clean-room installations at a secure location, can make these concerns minor by comparison to existing vote-fraud concerns.

(My vote would go to OpenBSD, Apache, and Mozilla, though of course good luck predicting what will be best four years from now.)

Also, net admins overseeing the effort need to have enough access to track and lock out attackers, but obviously they can't have access to change the election results. Lock them in a room for the day with a hundred video cameras tracking everything they do, like the officers on missile-launch duty. Many net admins will find this a relaxed and enjoyable work environment compared to their current jobs.

There are many problems that have to be solved -- please bring up the ones I haven't mentioned here, let's start the debate! My hunch is that they can be solved. And the overriding question must be, will it be an improvement over the current system?

Given that Florida's election is being decided by a 400-vote difference, with 19,000 botched votes thrown out, I'd say the impossibility of clicking on two presidential choices at the same time makes this system a huge win.

The broken user interface on our existing punch-cards system is probably going to give us the wrong President of the United States. How much worse could a digital system really be? I don't claim to have all the answers, but I know what century it is, and the time for Little House on the Prairie nonsense is over. Let's make this happen for 2004.

I'll give my last word to Andre Uratsuka Manoel, a partner at the internet firm Insite, in Brazil. (Props to TBTF for putting Andre and me in touch.)

Brazil has a 100% electronic election. On election day I go my "electoral section," identify myself, sign my name. The "section president" then types in my code and I walk to the booth which is in a corner of the room where no one can see my vote. I then type the number of my candidate, see his/her photo and press "confirm."

The voting machines store the votes in at least three different places: a floppy disk (which is locked), a flash card and the internal hard disk. There are written procedures for any kind of failure I could think of and back-up machines readily available. Those machines can connect to a phone line and send their results to the Election Court of the state.

The results are proclamed extremely fast. On the mayoral run-off elections that happened 2 weeks ago, results were out 2 hours after the election in the city I live in (Sao Paulo, with about 6 million voters) and 6 hours after it in the last city in which there was a run-off. In my home city the results came out a little after the election sites closed and the result was proclamed with the winner having 40 thousand votes more than the second place (0.4% of 1 million votes).

In the first round of elections in Sao Paulo, the third place contestant lost the ticket for the run-off elections by less than 0.1%. The one who lost didn't even think of contesting the results because no one thought there were any kind of frauds.

In the first round, 100 million voters (about the same as the active voters in US) in 5 thousand cities chose their mayors and councelors. All the results were proclaimed 30 hours after the voting closed.

This happens in a country that has a much lower level of literacy, technology-savvy and of money as the U.S. Remember that some mayors were chosen in places hours away from anyplace else (even by plane), i.e. in the middle of the rain forest. Those places don't have electricity.

Of course there were complaints, but not because of the electoral process. Mostly they were due to campaigning on the election day, voter transportation and coercion.

(Updates: Dave Riesz mentioned Riverside County, California, which has an electronic voting system already in place. Their 2000 primary turnout was the highest in 20 years, which may or may not mean anything. That led me to the California Internet Voting Task Force which looks interesting. Don Wegeng pointed me to RISKS thoughts by Douglas Jones. Brian Dunbar points out "Hurrah for Slow Recounts" by the always-interesting Ellen Ullman.

Lee Coursey passes along Elizabeth Ferrill's Discussion of Electronic Voting. James McCann, a programmer at VoteHere.net, says my description is "not terribly far off but very incomplete" -- I'll take that as a compliment -- check out his site and SecurePoll.com too. And finally, a story in Salon that makes my point better than I could: "Confessions of a Florida Poll Worker."

If you have more links or information, emailme.)

Dave writes: "The first non-beta release of Netscape 6.0 has made its way onto the Netscape FTP server. The Windows, Linux and Mac versions are currently available. The version in the directory pointed to is a network installer. If you want to download all the files in one go then go into the 'sea' directory. However, for a more cutting edge browser then grab the latest nightly builds from Mozilla.org, the Mozillazine builds page tells you which nightly builds are worth downloading." And Mozilla doesn't draw the same standards-compliance critiques as Netscape 6.0 does, either.

richard_za writes "The common notion that long necked dinosaurs held there necks high to graze from treetops has been proven impossible. Roger Seymour, from Adelaide University's Environmental Biology Department and Harvey Lillywhite from the University of Florida. According to a research paper published at the Proceedings of the Royal Society in London, he explained that due to heart size and metablic rates the only way they could have functioned on land was with a horizontal neck. This flies in the face of images popularised in Hollywood movies such as Jurassic Park. However it is doubted that this new evidence will have any effect on the Mozilla Project."

Steve Chapel writes: "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide author David Flanagan has posted an article and a petition requesting that the final release of the Netscape 6 browser based on the Mozilla open-source project be delayed until it fixes the problems with support for current Web standards." It seems clear to me that Netscape cares a lot more about shopping tabs and similar deadwood - things that bring immediate profit to the Netscape Corporation but absolutely no value to the user - than they do about putting out a decent browser. Personally, I'd recommend beta-testing IE 6, since IE not only has won the browser wars, it's clearly a better browser - and will remain so.

Steve Chapel writes: "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide author David Flanagan has posted an article and a petition requesting that the final release of the Netscape 6 browser based on the Mozilla open-source project be delayed until it fixes the problems with support for current Web standards." It seems clear to me that Netscape cares a lot more about shopping tabs and similar deadwood - things that bring immediate profit to the Netscape Corporation but absolutely no value to the user - than they do about putting out a decent browser. Personally, I'd recommend beta-testing IE 6, since IE not only has won the browser wars, it's clearly a better browser - and will remain so.

Michelle Head sends news of an interview with Mitchell Baker of mozilla.org, even as 10,000 readers submit news of Mozilla Milestone 4,734,018 , available now for your downloading and crashing pleasure. Now you can crash with java.

Here is your regular irregular dose of Slashdot story updates and obsessive compulsion -- some of it sad, some amusing, some utterly neutral and of no caloric value. For instance: You can win more than 50 of Roblimo's personal dollars if you work really hard, and wait a really long time.

"Kilby ... Kilby .. Kilby ..." [WHACK!] BMagneton writes: "The Nobel Prize for Physics was just awarded to several electronics pioneers, notably Alferov and Kroemer, who invented a bunch of semiconductor device construction methods, and Jack Kilby, who pretty much invented the microchip. The Nobel seems to have gone to a more practical/applied achievement than it usually does." And sconeu writes: "Wired News reports that Jack Kilby have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in the invention of the IC. The prize was split with Herbert Kroemer of UC Santa Barbara and Zhores Alferov of Russia who worked on semiconductor development as well."

And as "Boo," acclaimed international film star Keanu Reeves! Godzookie2k writes: "I was bored out of my mind the other night, and stumbled to boo.com's old site to see what would pop up. Mouth agape, I read: 'Boo.com returns, October 30, 2000.' yippie, you can download the official "boo" screensaver and enter some contest. See for yourself."

Some things are worth bringing back (Old Coke, bermuda shorts), and others may not be. Frankly, I'd never heard of Boo except maybe vaguely in the background until they went bust, time number one. On the other hand, our friend Pee-Wee was pretty funny in Mystery Men, so maybe anything is possible.

A browser for your naked (P)PC; combine with image filtering, stir. Mozilla keeps getting better -- I'm not afraid to show it to anyone right now, for instance -- but it's not exactly lightweight. Anyone who's been following the progress of Galeon may be interested when Markos writes: "Tired of waiting for a lightweight browser, that supports https, frames and all the other good stuff? BrowseX may be what your looking for. 'BrowseX is an Open Source, cross-platform Web Browser written primarily in Tcl.' You can check out the screenshots, features, and download." Or, for those of the Motorola persuasion, you'll be happy to hear that, as sephus writes "Opera for Linux PPC is now available at http://opera.online.no/linux/tgz/ - by popular request from Slashdot readers :) Opera"

Remember, retailers, you better not install these on computer that you know full well are going to be loaded with a god-fearin' American OS-thingie, like Innernet 'Splorer!

"OK, Mr. Gates, Meet Mr. Ponzi. Howdya do?" robl writes "There was a suprisingly under-ranked comment in the Microsoft story yesterday [about Microsoft and Taxes], pointing to the Fool's take on Microsoft's tax situation. It does a great job of clarifying the sfgate article yesterday. You see, Microsoft exercises it's stock options by printing more stock certificates. So they really only lose the cost of the paper and toner to print the stock, and they gain the money from the employees who exercise the options."

In fairness, this is approximately the same system used to fill the hypothetical coffers of the Social Security administration, but MS probably doesn't pay $534.55 for each toner cartridge ;)

My god! And they claim to be secure!? sporri writes: "The OpenBSD homepage has been updated (or downgraded) and now announces "Three years without a remote hole in the default install!" after a root hole was discovered and exploted in a library used by chpass. The sad thing it was fixed in the "current" source tree in June.UpsideToday has an interview with Aaron Campbell." If that's the worst you can say about an OS's security, it's a pretty strong endorsement for it being exemplary in that regard. OpenBSD and Debian get my vote for Most Serious Projects. Comments on the strongest security for (any particular) default Linux distro? Makes me think about Bastille Linux ...

A slew of people wrote in about the release of Netscape 6, PR 3 this morning -- Windows version, Linux 2.2, and Mac, assuming you speak English or Japanese. The word from Netscape is that French and German will be "soon." 'Course, I still think that apt-getting a certain Mozilla is all ya need, but hey.

Both Brendan Quinn and msim were curious about the ability to send gzip-encoded Web pages. Brendan asks: "It's possible to make Apache detect the "Accept-encoding: gzip" field sent by NS 4.7+, IE 4+ and Lynx, and send a gzip-encoded page, thus saving lots of bandwidth all over the place. So why don't people do it? Here is a module written by the Mozilla guys a couple of years ago that -almost- does what I want, and I could change it pretty easily... but I thought someone else would have done it by now? eXcite do it, does anyone know of any other large-scale sites that use gzip encoding?"

"If you have LWP installed, you can check with:

GET -p '<my proxy>' -H 'Accept-encoding: gzip' -e http://www.site.com/ | less

Try that with 'www.excite.com' and you'll get binary (gzipped) data. That's what I want to do."

berteag00 writes "The mozilla.org staff has posted an updated roadmap detailing the Mozilla code base's relationship to the upcoming launch of Netscape 6."

lunatik17 writes "NSS 3.1 Beta 1 has been released, including a new implementation of the RSA algorithm. This release provides, for the first time, a complete open-source implementation of the Netscape crypto libraries, and will be used in a future version of Personal Security Manager for Mozilla." This is the only significant feature I've found lacking in Mozilla.

thegrommit writes "No doubt I'm one amongst many, but Mozilla is going to be dual licensing their codebase" Actually, thegrommit was the first, but it's great news. Congratulations to all involved - I've been using Mozilla a huge amount over the last three months, and it's pretty amazing. You can check out the FAQ for more details.

thegrommit writes "No doubt I'm one amongst many, but Mozilla is going to be dual licensing their codebase" Actually, thegrommit was the first, but it's great news. Congratulations to all involved - I've been using Mozilla a huge amount over the last three months, and it's pretty amazing. You can check out the FAQ for more details.

As the title says - Mozilla M17 is out. Release notes are available at that Web page as well. As usual - please test it and submit bug reports.. (please note: this is NOT the nightly build that was posted here previously). Update: I just got note that Netscape 6.0 PR2 is also out. Netscape bug reports should be reported here only!

tetrad writes: "Suck admittedly isn't the most optimistic of sites, but more often than not, it's right on the money. Today's article is more of an obituary. 'Mozilla is dead, or might as well be,' says author Greg Knauss. While some might argue that Mozilla still has breath in it, Suck begs to 'pull the plug,' and points to Mozilla's decreasing market share, feature bloat, and failure to release a marketable product. It also jabs at the techies running the show: 'The Mozilla Project programmers repeatedly abandoned real-world progress and accomplishments for -- and this is the technical term -- cool shit.'" With the next MXX right around the corner, I have to disagree: besides that, I use Mozilla frequently and find that with a few minor exceptions, the latest builds are as good or better than Netscape under Linux (although secure transactions are problematic).

If you've tossed and turned wondering whether the Plan 9 License is Free or merely free, or tossed back the warm milk and cookies waiting for the first stabilizations for XFree86 4.0 to arrive, or counted sheep as you daydream about a cheap Linux-based terminal without monthly fees, or forced deep breathing exercises to get over the thought that perhaps you could doing something to stamp out discourteous Web page behavior ... relax. Go to sleep right after you read these updates.

How soon is now? Unlike a lot of cool-sounding soon-to-be-released, wouldn't-it-be-cool promiseware, it's interesting to see hardware that actually makes it to market before its underlying idea is doomed by advances sweeping past. Larry Ellison's $199 Linux box mentioned on Slashdot a while back appears to have reached that point. The NIC Web site has changed, and no longer is the only way to order one donating it to an underserved school.

Why don't you find out for yourself? jesser writes "Many slashdotters asked on the lock-in attack story whether/when mozilla would be safe from this type of attack. Here are some links to bugzilla bug entries in case any slashdotters would like to work on making mozilla more secure:

• bug 29346: Prevent repeating pop-up windows
• bug 33448: disable 'new window' when close box clicked
• bug 22049: javascript alert should not put up extermely modal dialog"

You've got everything now. Patrick Mullen writes "I just finished my review of XFree86 4.0.1. I've had a lot of requests to see a feature on this when it hit (apparently they liked the last article), and here it is. There's benchmarks, overview of the bug fixes, and new features. In addition to the review, I've also got the new NVidia 0.9-4 drivers which allow NVidia's line of cards to function correctly on XFree86 4.0.1 available on the website-and these are not available on even NVidia's website at the time."

That joke isn't funny any more. A number of readers wrote in with harsh words about the report that Apple forced the removal of rumors regarding an alleged next-generation translucent-cased machine.

Kaufmann, for instance, wrote: "Remember the whole story about MOSR's article regarding the new generation of Macs getting pulled at the request of Apple Legal? Well, an Alan Smithee is claiming that it's a hoax. To prove it, he's put up the very same article on the Personal Homepage service provided by Apple at Mac.com. Further investigation seems necessary." Note: not that putting an article on Apple's Personal Homepage service proves it's worthiness, but it does beg the question of Apple being quick to pounce on it. "Alan Smithee" doesn't exactly inspire confidence either, though -- that's the pseudonym directors traditionally use to distance themselves from films they consider too bad to bear their real names;)

Similarly, an unnamed correpsondent had this to say: "The Apple cube that has been talked about the past few days is a total hoax. Some guy sent an email with fake specs to MacOSRumors and they posted it. Kind of makes one question the credibility of Ryan Meader saying that Apple forced him to take it down. Anyways you can see the fake email at: [this link]."

Stop me if you think you've heard this one before ... QBasic_Dude writes "Richard Stallman wrote about the Problems of the Plan Nine License. Technocrat has a discussion about this, and so does Advogato."

Richard cites what he considers odious provisions in the putatively "open source" Plan 9 license (like this one: "You agree to provide the Original Contributor, at its request, with a copy of the complete Source Code version, Object Code version and related documentation for Modifications created or contributed to by You if used for any purpose.") and responds with typical Stallman pithiness, "This prohibits modifications for private use, denying the users a basic right." There's much more to read there, and worth your time. (As are the discussions at Advogato and Technocrat!)

If you've tossed and turned wondering whether the Plan 9 License is Free or merely free, or tossed back the warm milk and cookies waiting for the first stabilizations for XFree86 4.0 to arrive, or counted sheep as you daydream about a cheap Linux-based terminal without monthly fees, or forced deep breathing exercises to get over the thought that perhaps you could doing something to stamp out discourteous Web page behavior ... relax. Go to sleep right after you read these updates.

How soon is now? Unlike a lot of cool-sounding soon-to-be-released, wouldn't-it-be-cool promiseware, it's interesting to see hardware that actually makes it to market before its underlying idea is doomed by advances sweeping past. Larry Ellison's $199 Linux box mentioned on Slashdot a while back appears to have reached that point. The NIC Web site has changed, and no longer is the only way to order one donating it to an underserved school.

Why don't you find out for yourself? jesser writes "Many slashdotters asked on the lock-in attack story whether/when mozilla would be safe from this type of attack. Here are some links to bugzilla bug entries in case any slashdotters would like to work on making mozilla more secure:

• bug 29346: Prevent repeating pop-up windows
• bug 33448: disable 'new window' when close box clicked
• bug 22049: javascript alert should not put up extermely modal dialog"

You've got everything now. Patrick Mullen writes "I just finished my review of XFree86 4.0.1. I've had a lot of requests to see a feature on this when it hit (apparently they liked the last article), and here it is. There's benchmarks, overview of the bug fixes, and new features. In addition to the review, I've also got the new NVidia 0.9-4 drivers which allow NVidia's line of cards to function correctly on XFree86 4.0.1 available on the website-and these are not available on even NVidia's website at the time."

That joke isn't funny any more. A number of readers wrote in with harsh words about the report that Apple forced the removal of rumors regarding an alleged next-generation translucent-cased machine.

Kaufmann, for instance, wrote: "Remember the whole story about MOSR's article regarding the new generation of Macs getting pulled at the request of Apple Legal? Well, an Alan Smithee is claiming that it's a hoax. To prove it, he's put up the very same article on the Personal Homepage service provided by Apple at Mac.com. Further investigation seems necessary." Note: not that putting an article on Apple's Personal Homepage service proves it's worthiness, but it does beg the question of Apple being quick to pounce on it. "Alan Smithee" doesn't exactly inspire confidence either, though -- that's the pseudonym directors traditionally use to distance themselves from films they consider too bad to bear their real names;)

Similarly, an unnamed correpsondent had this to say: "The Apple cube that has been talked about the past few days is a total hoax. Some guy sent an email with fake specs to MacOSRumors and they posted it. Kind of makes one question the credibility of Ryan Meader saying that Apple forced him to take it down. Anyways you can see the fake email at: [this link]."

Stop me if you think you've heard this one before ... QBasic_Dude writes "Richard Stallman wrote about the Problems of the Plan Nine License. Technocrat has a discussion about this, and so does Advogato."

Richard cites what he considers odious provisions in the putatively "open source" Plan 9 license (like this one: "You agree to provide the Original Contributor, at its request, with a copy of the complete Source Code version, Object Code version and related documentation for Modifications created or contributed to by You if used for any purpose.") and responds with typical Stallman pithiness, "This prohibits modifications for private use, denying the users a basic right." There's much more to read there, and worth your time. (As are the discussions at Advogato and Technocrat!)

If you've tossed and turned wondering whether the Plan 9 License is Free or merely free, or tossed back the warm milk and cookies waiting for the first stabilizations for XFree86 4.0 to arrive, or counted sheep as you daydream about a cheap Linux-based terminal without monthly fees, or forced deep breathing exercises to get over the thought that perhaps you could doing something to stamp out discourteous Web page behavior ... relax. Go to sleep right after you read these updates.

How soon is now? Unlike a lot of cool-sounding soon-to-be-released, wouldn't-it-be-cool promiseware, it's interesting to see hardware that actually makes it to market before its underlying idea is doomed by advances sweeping past. Larry Ellison's $199 Linux box mentioned on Slashdot a while back appears to have reached that point. The NIC Web site has changed, and no longer is the only way to order one donating it to an underserved school.

Why don't you find out for yourself? jesser writes "Many slashdotters asked on the lock-in attack story whether/when mozilla would be safe from this type of attack. Here are some links to bugzilla bug entries in case any slashdotters would like to work on making mozilla more secure:

• bug 29346: Prevent repeating pop-up windows
• bug 33448: disable 'new window' when close box clicked
• bug 22049: javascript alert should not put up extermely modal dialog"

You've got everything now. Patrick Mullen writes "I just finished my review of XFree86 4.0.1. I've had a lot of requests to see a feature on this when it hit (apparently they liked the last article), and here it is. There's benchmarks, overview of the bug fixes, and new features. In addition to the review, I've also got the new NVidia 0.9-4 drivers which allow NVidia's line of cards to function correctly on XFree86 4.0.1 available on the website-and these are not available on even NVidia's website at the time."

That joke isn't funny any more. A number of readers wrote in with harsh words about the report that Apple forced the removal of rumors regarding an alleged next-generation translucent-cased machine.

Kaufmann, for instance, wrote: "Remember the whole story about MOSR's article regarding the new generation of Macs getting pulled at the request of Apple Legal? Well, an Alan Smithee is claiming that it's a hoax. To prove it, he's put up the very same article on the Personal Homepage service provided by Apple at Mac.com. Further investigation seems necessary." Note: not that putting an article on Apple's Personal Homepage service proves it's worthiness, but it does beg the question of Apple being quick to pounce on it. "Alan Smithee" doesn't exactly inspire confidence either, though -- that's the pseudonym directors traditionally use to distance themselves from films they consider too bad to bear their real names;)

Similarly, an unnamed correpsondent had this to say: "The Apple cube that has been talked about the past few days is a total hoax. Some guy sent an email with fake specs to MacOSRumors and they posted it. Kind of makes one question the credibility of Ryan Meader saying that Apple forced him to take it down. Anyways you can see the fake email at: [this link]."

Stop me if you think you've heard this one before ... QBasic_Dude writes "Richard Stallman wrote about the Problems of the Plan Nine License. Technocrat has a discussion about this, and so does Advogato."

Richard cites what he considers odious provisions in the putatively "open source" Plan 9 license (like this one: "You agree to provide the Original Contributor, at its request, with a copy of the complete Source Code version, Object Code version and related documentation for Modifications created or contributed to by You if used for any purpose.") and responds with typical Stallman pithiness, "This prohibits modifications for private use, denying the users a basic right." There's much more to read there, and worth your time. (As are the discussions at Advogato and Technocrat!)

Mozilla's latest milestone, M17, arrived today(ish); early adopters, go thou and download. And while you're waiting, check out this summary of the state of the art of PNG written by Greg Roelofs. PNG is ready for prime time in its Mozilla incarnation (though there are a few outstanding issues). Imminent takeover of the net predicted. Film at 11. Update later by J: OK, so M17 isn't available yet. Mea culpa; Greg and I misread a planning page. Here are Greg's comments/corrections to clear up the matter.

PNG, MNG, JNG and Mozilla M17
26 June 2000
by Greg Roelofs

PNG support in Mozilla has improved greatly over the last few releases ("milestones"), and with each milestone comes a corresponding Slashdot posting and a lot of discussion. Unfortunately, not all of the discussion is entirely accurate, so here's a preemptive posting that attempts to update folks on the status of PNG support in Mozilla and other apps and to clear up some of the more common misconceptions. (This seems to be an annual event...)

Home Page

First of all, the PNG home page got booted off of cdrom.com in early March, and in early May it settled into what should be its absolutely final home:

• http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/
• ftp://ftp.libpng.org/pub/png/

This is currently hosted on freesoftware.com, Walnut Creek CD-ROM's new site for free software (quel surprise!), but if something should ever happen to Walnut Creek, libpng.org will be redirected appropriately. (On a related note, the new zlib URL is http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/, which is also currently hosted on freesoftware.com.)

PNG Features for the Web

Insofar as this is ostensibly a Mozilla posting, let's have a brief rundown of the PNG features that are most useful to Web designers:

• alpha transparency - This is geek jargon for partial or variable transparency, and it lets you do nice effects that are independent of the background color(s), such as antialiased (non-jaggy) text, drop shadows, gradient fades, and translucency. PNG not only supports a full 8-bit alpha channel in grayscale and RGB images but also what amounts to an "RGBA palette" in colormapped images. The latter lets you do nice transparency without a huge hit in file size. For example, all but one of the transparent images on my PNG alpha-transparency test page are 8-bit or less; the lone exception (one of the toucans) is a 32-bit RGBA image, virtually indistinguishable from its 8-bit cousins. Note that PNG supports only unassociated (non-premultiplied) alpha, since the alternative is not lossless.

• gamma correction - Gamma allows you to display the same image on different platforms without looking too dark on some and too light on others. For best results it does require that both the designer's display system and the user's be calibrated, but even educated guessing is better than nothing in a viewing program (which is what Mozilla does). Warning! Watch out for Adobe Photoshop; version 5.0 had a serious factor-of-two bug in its PNG gamma support, and 4.0 also had some problems. (Things seem to be fixed in 5.5, however.)

• color correction - Where gamma has to do with image "brightness," color correction has to do with rendering shades of color precisely. PNG supports it, but not many applications do; it's pretty tricky to get right. Note that Photoshop 5.5 writes incorrect PNG "iCCP" chunks, and this will crash applications based on libpng 1.0.6. (Older versions of libpng ignore the chunk, and the soon-to-be-released libpng 1.0.7 will work around it.) Also note that feeding a valid iCCP chunk to PS 5.5 will hang it.

• compression - A lot of people have some seriously crazy ideas about PNG's compression. Here's the straight dope:
  • PNGs tend to be 15% to 20% smaller than equivalent GIFs on average. There are some GIFs, particularly 32- or 64-color ones, that are smaller than the best PNGs, but usually by only a couple of percent. There are also many that are more than twice as large as the corresponding PNGs, but these tend to be tiny images. (One exception is this image, which is dimensionally rather large yet only 1/3 the file size of the GIF version.)

  • PNGs tend to be much larger than standard JPEGs. JPEGs are lossy, while PNGs are lossless; for natural (photographic) material, no lossless format can compete with JPEG--PNGs will typically be 5 or 10 times as large. On the other hand, for simple graphics or text-filled images with relatively few colors and sharp edges, JPEG is much worse, both in quality and in file size. (This means you, Slackware guys!) Use the proper tool for the job--no single image format is best in all cases.

  • PNG is roughly comparable to JPEG-LS, the new lossless JPEG standard. On the Waterloo BragZone test suite, JPEG-LS beat PNG by 5% to 10% on natural images, but PNG beat JPEG-LS by 35% to 270% on "artistic" images. YMMV.

  • PNG's compression method can be implemented in such a way that it is completely free of all known patents, but it can also be implemented in such a way that it infringes on patents held by PKWARE, Stac and others. You can guess which way zlib was written. Folks who are neither rich nor expert in patent law should probably stick to zlib- and libpng-based implementations.

  • Unlike (LZW-based) GIF, in which the compression is basically deterministic--that is, you end up with pretty much the same data regardless of who does the compression--PNG's scheme leaves a lot of room for optimization. Some programs do a good job, some don't. The GIMP happens to be one of the good ones, as is pngcrush. Photoshop traditionally has been one of the not-so-good ones, although version 5.5 includes a "Save for Web" option that presumably invokes ImageReady. ImageReady 1.0 was mediocre and reportedly isn't much better in its current release (i.e., pngcrush beats it by 15% to 25%), but it is better than Photoshop's normal "Save as" option.

  • The compression engine can't help clueless users who perform apples-and-oranges comparisons. If you start with a truecolor image and save it as both GIF and PNG, chances are the PNG will be 24-bit while the GIF will be 8-bit. Guess what? It's pretty tough to overcome that initial 3:1 deficit, no matter how good your compression engine is. (If you're not sure what kind of PNGs you have, check!) Also don't add a lot of text annotations to the PNG--unless you do the same to the GIF--and especially don't add a useless alpha channel to opaque images! (That last is directed at the Burn All GIFs folks...) Recompressing an image after it's been through JPEG compression is also a bad idea; JPEG leaves a lot of nasty little artifacts (often invisible to the naked eye) that screw up non-JPEG compressors.

• interlacing - PNG's interlacing scheme is two-dimensional, much like progressive JPEG, but unlike GIF--which uses a one-dimensional, line-based scheme. The upshot is that an interlaced PNG with text in it will be readable roughly twice as soon as the corresponding interlaced GIF.

• animation - Nope. But see MNG, below.

• MIME type - image/png. If PNG images on your server show up as broken images within Web pages and as gobbledygook text when referenced directly (i.e., as standalone URLs), you probably don't have the MIME type set up correctly. On the other hand, if they show up correctly for MSIE and some versions of Netscape but not others, you're probably running Microsoft's IIS server. Technically it's a bug in older versions of Netscape (versions 4.04 through 4.5), but consider switching to Apache anyway...

• browser compatibility - We'll get to that in a moment.

PNG Extensions and the Future

PNG is extensible. PNG is lossless. PNG is a single-image, raster (bitmap) format. One of its overriding design goals was backward compatibility. As a result, don't expect to see any sort of lossy compression methods (JPEG is doing a fine job of that, with the exception of transparency--but see JNG, below). Also don't expect to see any vector-based extensions--SVG with gzip content-encoding has that covered. Indeed, don't expect to see any new, incompatible compression methods for quite a while. Until there are lossless methods that can, on average, halve the size of PNG images, the cost in software compatibility is far too great. (Keep in mind that there still browsers that don't support progressive JPEG, and that was a relatively trivial change! And let's not even talk about JPEG 2000...)

PNG is also not going to become an animated format. Leaving multiple-image support out of PNG was a conscious design decision by the PNG development group, and it's still the right decision. Overloading a still image format with animation or video features merely confuses users and Web browsers, which have no way to distinguish still images from animations without prying into the data streams (which usually means downloading them first). Developers who prefer to program monolithically can always program for MNG instead; it's architecturally identical to PNG, and PNG is a pure subset of MNG.

Related Formats

MNG: As the previous paragraph suggests, the animated version of PNG is called MNG, for Multiple-image Network Graphics. It supports looping (including nested loops), clipping, deltas, and other features, plus everything PNG supports--including alpha transparency, of course. The home page is here:

• http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/
• ftp://ftp.libpng.org/pub/mng/

Since this spring, a free reference library, libmng, has been under development by Gerard Juyn; its home page is at:

• http://www.libmng.com/

Note that the MIME type is video/x-mng; it has not yet been registered with the IETF. Undoubtedly there will be many misconfigured Web servers in coming years...

JNG: JNG is short for JPEG Network Graphics and is a proper subset of MNG, just as PNG is, but it's worth a separate mention. The idea is to combine the best of both worlds: JPEG's excellent compression and PNG's incredibly spiffy alpha transparency and color correction. JNG is almost identical to PNG, but in addition to standard IDAT chunks (which in JNG contain the alpha channel), there are also JDAT chunks that contain a standard JPEG/JFIF stream (suitable for handing off to libjpeg). From a developer's standpoint, if you've got support for both PNG alpha and ordinary JPEG/JFIF, adding JNG is a breeze. Of course, JNG is also supported by recent libmng betas. Its MIME type is image/x-jng.

Browser Status

Most browsers have supported PNG since at least late 1997 (when Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer finally did), but almost without exception, their support for alpha transparency has been abominable. Amazingly enough, it seems that 2000 may be the year that browsers finally support it, more or less ubiquitously. In April alone there were three newcomers, with another in May; so far this year, the total has more than doubled. Here's the current list of browsers that at least attempt to do alpha transparency correctly, with their supported platforms indicated in italics. If screen shots of the PNG alpha-transparency test page are available, they're linked to the browser name:

• Arena (Unix/X) - this was the first browser with good alpha support (at least for Unix, and I think anywhere). It died in 1998, however, and the final release tends to core-dump on PNG images. It always used its own "sandy" background pattern rather than that specified in the HTML. (Very old screen shot.)
• Browse (RISC OS) - Acorn's browser was the first to fully support PNG transparency and gamma correction, including background images, but it died along with Acorn itself in June 1999. The browser may or may not eventually show up in Pace Micro's digital set-top boxes. (Very old screen shot.)
• iCab (Macintosh) - this was the first Macintosh browser to support alpha transparency (since the 1.8 beta), but it doesn't do gamma correction yet.
• ICE Browser (Java) - ICEsoft's commercial browser for Java reportedly has full alpha support, but I haven't verified that.
• Internet Explorer (Macintosh) - version 5.0 added superb PNG support, including alpha, gamma and color correction. This is probably the best PNG-supporting browser available today. Unfortunately, the Windows and Unix versions seem to be a completely separate code base, so there's no telling when (or if) they'll have equally good support. (See the browsers page for details.)
• Konqueror (Unix/KDE) - I just heard that KDE's file-manager-cum-browser has full alpha support, but I haven't had a chance to check it myself. I'll try to get some screen shots added soon, however.
• Mozilla (Macintosh, Unix/X, Windows) - alpha was enabled in April, though there are a few gotchas: the Windows code is currently broken (bug 36694 and 19283, to be fixed by beta3), and the X code is a slightly nasty hack--it looks beautiful on 24-bit displays, but it's slow when scrolling, and the quality for users of 8- and 16-bit displays will be relatively poor. Nevertheless, it's a vast improvement over the previous code, and it's basically the only game in town for Unix users. Note that the infamous PNG interlacing bug (3195) was fixed in May, and Tim Rowley checked in initial MNG and JNG support on 12June.
• NetPositive (BeOS) - version 2.2, released in April, added support for alpha transparency; but like iCab, it doesn't yet do gamma correction. (It also doesn't display interlaced PNGs progressively.)
• Netscape - see Mozilla (which is basically what Navigator 6.0 will be).
• Sega Dreamcast Web Browser (Dreamcast) - version 2.0 of Planetweb's browser for the Sega Dreamcast game console, released in May, fully supports alpha transparency, but I don't have any screen shots yet.
• Webster XL (RISC OS) - R-Comp's RISC OS browser is claimed to have full alpha support, but I don't have verification, and it doesn't appear to be under development anymore.
• WebTV (WebTV) - surprisingly enough, WebTV has decent support for 32-bit RGBA PNGs, but its support for palette transparency is broken. In principle it should be easy to fix, but then again, it's a strange platform. (Note that the fonts look considerably better on a television screen.)

Honorable Mention goes to Siegel & Gale's PNG Live plug-in for Netscape, which was the only plug-in ever to manage alpha transparency (in Windows only). It died before ever getting out of beta, though, and plug-ins in general are useless for PNG. So is the HTML 4.0 OBJECT tag, but don't get me started...

Other Apps, Libs, etc.

I currently list some 500 distinct PNG-supporting packages (more if you break things like Microsoft Office into their constituent parts) in 8 categories (soon to be 9 or 10), not to mention a dozen pieces of hardware. PNG has now reached the point where even freeware authors generally don't bother to tell me when they've added support; it's largely taken for granted. (I do occasional Freshmeat sweeps, but I usually don't have time, and many entries don't mention PNG even if it's supported.) Quite a number of the apps include full source code, by the way--which is the way it should be, of course. ;-)

Within the libraries-and-toolkits category, there are a surprising number of independent PNG implementations (either encoders or decoders or both), including ones in C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Pascal, and even Ada95. PNG is now a standard part of Java 2 SE 1.3 and Tcl/Tk, and it is the main image format in the popular gd library and all of its Perl-based derivatives. In turn, this has led to its online use in areas as diverse as server statistics, chemical diagrams, computer-generated mazes, and weather maps.

Even better, PNG is the native, internal image format for a number of major applications (including Macromedia Fireworks and Microsoft Office), and it's becoming a popular icon format for advanced GUIs. It also ships as a standard part of BeOS, via the Translation Kit, and it's supported natively in the Windows Me shell (and possibly in Windows 2000 Professional).

Conclusion?

Ordinarily I'd mumble something about how PNG has finally achieved massive studliness and will soon be taking over the world, but what the hell--it has, it is, and if it's not obvious from what I've already written, another couple of lines won't make any difference. Go forth, visit the web site, write code, make lots of PNGs, etc., etc.

And Microsoft, pleeeeease get on the ball with Internet Explorer for Windows and Unix...

Mozilla's latest milestone, M17, arrived today(ish); early adopters, go thou and download. And while you're waiting, check out this summary of the state of the art of PNG written by Greg Roelofs. PNG is ready for prime time in its Mozilla incarnation (though there are a few outstanding issues). Imminent takeover of the net predicted. Film at 11. Update later by J: OK, so M17 isn't available yet. Mea culpa; Greg and I misread a planning page. Here are Greg's comments/corrections to clear up the matter.

PNG, MNG, JNG and Mozilla M17
26 June 2000
by Greg Roelofs

PNG support in Mozilla has improved greatly over the last few releases ("milestones"), and with each milestone comes a corresponding Slashdot posting and a lot of discussion. Unfortunately, not all of the discussion is entirely accurate, so here's a preemptive posting that attempts to update folks on the status of PNG support in Mozilla and other apps and to clear up some of the more common misconceptions. (This seems to be an annual event...)

Home Page

First of all, the PNG home page got booted off of cdrom.com in early March, and in early May it settled into what should be its absolutely final home:

• http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/
• ftp://ftp.libpng.org/pub/png/

This is currently hosted on freesoftware.com, Walnut Creek CD-ROM's new site for free software (quel surprise!), but if something should ever happen to Walnut Creek, libpng.org will be redirected appropriately. (On a related note, the new zlib URL is http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/, which is also currently hosted on freesoftware.com.)

PNG Features for the Web

Insofar as this is ostensibly a Mozilla posting, let's have a brief rundown of the PNG features that are most useful to Web designers:

• alpha transparency - This is geek jargon for partial or variable transparency, and it lets you do nice effects that are independent of the background color(s), such as antialiased (non-jaggy) text, drop shadows, gradient fades, and translucency. PNG not only supports a full 8-bit alpha channel in grayscale and RGB images but also what amounts to an "RGBA palette" in colormapped images. The latter lets you do nice transparency without a huge hit in file size. For example, all but one of the transparent images on my PNG alpha-transparency test page are 8-bit or less; the lone exception (one of the toucans) is a 32-bit RGBA image, virtually indistinguishable from its 8-bit cousins. Note that PNG supports only unassociated (non-premultiplied) alpha, since the alternative is not lossless.

• gamma correction - Gamma allows you to display the same image on different platforms without looking too dark on some and too light on others. For best results it does require that both the designer's display system and the user's be calibrated, but even educated guessing is better than nothing in a viewing program (which is what Mozilla does). Warning! Watch out for Adobe Photoshop; version 5.0 had a serious factor-of-two bug in its PNG gamma support, and 4.0 also had some problems. (Things seem to be fixed in 5.5, however.)

• color correction - Where gamma has to do with image "brightness," color correction has to do with rendering shades of color precisely. PNG supports it, but not many applications do; it's pretty tricky to get right. Note that Photoshop 5.5 writes incorrect PNG "iCCP" chunks, and this will crash applications based on libpng 1.0.6. (Older versions of libpng ignore the chunk, and the soon-to-be-released libpng 1.0.7 will work around it.) Also note that feeding a valid iCCP chunk to PS 5.5 will hang it.

• compression - A lot of people have some seriously crazy ideas about PNG's compression. Here's the straight dope:
  • PNGs tend to be 15% to 20% smaller than equivalent GIFs on average. There are some GIFs, particularly 32- or 64-color ones, that are smaller than the best PNGs, but usually by only a couple of percent. There are also many that are more than twice as large as the corresponding PNGs, but these tend to be tiny images. (One exception is this image, which is dimensionally rather large yet only 1/3 the file size of the GIF version.)

  • PNGs tend to be much larger than standard JPEGs. JPEGs are lossy, while PNGs are lossless; for natural (photographic) material, no lossless format can compete with JPEG--PNGs will typically be 5 or 10 times as large. On the other hand, for simple graphics or text-filled images with relatively few colors and sharp edges, JPEG is much worse, both in quality and in file size. (This means you, Slackware guys!) Use the proper tool for the job--no single image format is best in all cases.

  • PNG is roughly comparable to JPEG-LS, the new lossless JPEG standard. On the Waterloo BragZone test suite, JPEG-LS beat PNG by 5% to 10% on natural images, but PNG beat JPEG-LS by 35% to 270% on "artistic" images. YMMV.

  • PNG's compression method can be implemented in such a way that it is completely free of all known patents, but it can also be implemented in such a way that it infringes on patents held by PKWARE, Stac and others. You can guess which way zlib was written. Folks who are neither rich nor expert in patent law should probably stick to zlib- and libpng-based implementations.

  • Unlike (LZW-based) GIF, in which the compression is basically deterministic--that is, you end up with pretty much the same data regardless of who does the compression--PNG's scheme leaves a lot of room for optimization. Some programs do a good job, some don't. The GIMP happens to be one of the good ones, as is pngcrush. Photoshop traditionally has been one of the not-so-good ones, although version 5.5 includes a "Save for Web" option that presumably invokes ImageReady. ImageReady 1.0 was mediocre and reportedly isn't much better in its current release (i.e., pngcrush beats it by 15% to 25%), but it is better than Photoshop's normal "Save as" option.

  • The compression engine can't help clueless users who perform apples-and-oranges comparisons. If you start with a truecolor image and save it as both GIF and PNG, chances are the PNG will be 24-bit while the GIF will be 8-bit. Guess what? It's pretty tough to overcome that initial 3:1 deficit, no matter how good your compression engine is. (If you're not sure what kind of PNGs you have, check!) Also don't add a lot of text annotations to the PNG--unless you do the same to the GIF--and especially don't add a useless alpha channel to opaque images! (That last is directed at the Burn All GIFs folks...) Recompressing an image after it's been through JPEG compression is also a bad idea; JPEG leaves a lot of nasty little artifacts (often invisible to the naked eye) that screw up non-JPEG compressors.

• interlacing - PNG's interlacing scheme is two-dimensional, much like progressive JPEG, but unlike GIF--which uses a one-dimensional, line-based scheme. The upshot is that an interlaced PNG with text in it will be readable roughly twice as soon as the corresponding interlaced GIF.

• animation - Nope. But see MNG, below.

• MIME type - image/png. If PNG images on your server show up as broken images within Web pages and as gobbledygook text when referenced directly (i.e., as standalone URLs), you probably don't have the MIME type set up correctly. On the other hand, if they show up correctly for MSIE and some versions of Netscape but not others, you're probably running Microsoft's IIS server. Technically it's a bug in older versions of Netscape (versions 4.04 through 4.5), but consider switching to Apache anyway...

• browser compatibility - We'll get to that in a moment.

PNG Extensions and the Future

PNG is extensible. PNG is lossless. PNG is a single-image, raster (bitmap) format. One of its overriding design goals was backward compatibility. As a result, don't expect to see any sort of lossy compression methods (JPEG is doing a fine job of that, with the exception of transparency--but see JNG, below). Also don't expect to see any vector-based extensions--SVG with gzip content-encoding has that covered. Indeed, don't expect to see any new, incompatible compression methods for quite a while. Until there are lossless methods that can, on average, halve the size of PNG images, the cost in software compatibility is far too great. (Keep in mind that there still browsers that don't support progressive JPEG, and that was a relatively trivial change! And let's not even talk about JPEG 2000...)

PNG is also not going to become an animated format. Leaving multiple-image support out of PNG was a conscious design decision by the PNG development group, and it's still the right decision. Overloading a still image format with animation or video features merely confuses users and Web browsers, which have no way to distinguish still images from animations without prying into the data streams (which usually means downloading them first). Developers who prefer to program monolithically can always program for MNG instead; it's architecturally identical to PNG, and PNG is a pure subset of MNG.

Related Formats

MNG: As the previous paragraph suggests, the animated version of PNG is called MNG, for Multiple-image Network Graphics. It supports looping (including nested loops), clipping, deltas, and other features, plus everything PNG supports--including alpha transparency, of course. The home page is here:

• http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/
• ftp://ftp.libpng.org/pub/mng/

Since this spring, a free reference library, libmng, has been under development by Gerard Juyn; its home page is at:

• http://www.libmng.com/

Note that the MIME type is video/x-mng; it has not yet been registered with the IETF. Undoubtedly there will be many misconfigured Web servers in coming years...

JNG: JNG is short for JPEG Network Graphics and is a proper subset of MNG, just as PNG is, but it's worth a separate mention. The idea is to combine the best of both worlds: JPEG's excellent compression and PNG's incredibly spiffy alpha transparency and color correction. JNG is almost identical to PNG, but in addition to standard IDAT chunks (which in JNG contain the alpha channel), there are also JDAT chunks that contain a standard JPEG/JFIF stream (suitable for handing off to libjpeg). From a developer's standpoint, if you've got support for both PNG alpha and ordinary JPEG/JFIF, adding JNG is a breeze. Of course, JNG is also supported by recent libmng betas. Its MIME type is image/x-jng.

Browser Status

Most browsers have supported PNG since at least late 1997 (when Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer finally did), but almost without exception, their support for alpha transparency has been abominable. Amazingly enough, it seems that 2000 may be the year that browsers finally support it, more or less ubiquitously. In April alone there were three newcomers, with another in May; so far this year, the total has more than doubled. Here's the current list of browsers that at least attempt to do alpha transparency correctly, with their supported platforms indicated in italics. If screen shots of the PNG alpha-transparency test page are available, they're linked to the browser name:

• Arena (Unix/X) - this was the first browser with good alpha support (at least for Unix, and I think anywhere). It died in 1998, however, and the final release tends to core-dump on PNG images. It always used its own "sandy" background pattern rather than that specified in the HTML. (Very old screen shot.)
• Browse (RISC OS) - Acorn's browser was the first to fully support PNG transparency and gamma correction, including background images, but it died along with Acorn itself in June 1999. The browser may or may not eventually show up in Pace Micro's digital set-top boxes. (Very old screen shot.)
• iCab (Macintosh) - this was the first Macintosh browser to support alpha transparency (since the 1.8 beta), but it doesn't do gamma correction yet.
• ICE Browser (Java) - ICEsoft's commercial browser for Java reportedly has full alpha support, but I haven't verified that.
• Internet Explorer (Macintosh) - version 5.0 added superb PNG support, including alpha, gamma and color correction. This is probably the best PNG-supporting browser available today. Unfortunately, the Windows and Unix versions seem to be a completely separate code base, so there's no telling when (or if) they'll have equally good support. (See the browsers page for details.)
• Konqueror (Unix/KDE) - I just heard that KDE's file-manager-cum-browser has full alpha support, but I haven't had a chance to check it myself. I'll try to get some screen shots added soon, however.
• Mozilla (Macintosh, Unix/X, Windows) - alpha was enabled in April, though there are a few gotchas: the Windows code is currently broken (bug 36694 and 19283, to be fixed by beta3), and the X code is a slightly nasty hack--it looks beautiful on 24-bit displays, but it's slow when scrolling, and the quality for users of 8- and 16-bit displays will be relatively poor. Nevertheless, it's a vast improvement over the previous code, and it's basically the only game in town for Unix users. Note that the infamous PNG interlacing bug (3195) was fixed in May, and Tim Rowley checked in initial MNG and JNG support on 12June.
• NetPositive (BeOS) - version 2.2, released in April, added support for alpha transparency; but like iCab, it doesn't yet do gamma correction. (It also doesn't display interlaced PNGs progressively.)
• Netscape - see Mozilla (which is basically what Navigator 6.0 will be).
• Sega Dreamcast Web Browser (Dreamcast) - version 2.0 of Planetweb's browser for the Sega Dreamcast game console, released in May, fully supports alpha transparency, but I don't have any screen shots yet.
• Webster XL (RISC OS) - R-Comp's RISC OS browser is claimed to have full alpha support, but I don't have verification, and it doesn't appear to be under development anymore.
• WebTV (WebTV) - surprisingly enough, WebTV has decent support for 32-bit RGBA PNGs, but its support for palette transparency is broken. In principle it should be easy to fix, but then again, it's a strange platform. (Note that the fonts look considerably better on a television screen.)

Honorable Mention goes to Siegel & Gale's PNG Live plug-in for Netscape, which was the only plug-in ever to manage alpha transparency (in Windows only). It died before ever getting out of beta, though, and plug-ins in general are useless for PNG. So is the HTML 4.0 OBJECT tag, but don't get me started...

Other Apps, Libs, etc.

I currently list some 500 distinct PNG-supporting packages (more if you break things like Microsoft Office into their constituent parts) in 8 categories (soon to be 9 or 10), not to mention a dozen pieces of hardware. PNG has now reached the point where even freeware authors generally don't bother to tell me when they've added support; it's largely taken for granted. (I do occasional Freshmeat sweeps, but I usually don't have time, and many entries don't mention PNG even if it's supported.) Quite a number of the apps include full source code, by the way--which is the way it should be, of course. ;-)

Within the libraries-and-toolkits category, there are a surprising number of independent PNG implementations (either encoders or decoders or both), including ones in C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Pascal, and even Ada95. PNG is now a standard part of Java 2 SE 1.3 and Tcl/Tk, and it is the main image format in the popular gd library and all of its Perl-based derivatives. In turn, this has led to its online use in areas as diverse as server statistics, chemical diagrams, computer-generated mazes, and weather maps.

Even better, PNG is the native, internal image format for a number of major applications (including Macromedia Fireworks and Microsoft Office), and it's becoming a popular icon format for advanced GUIs. It also ships as a standard part of BeOS, via the Translation Kit, and it's supported natively in the Windows Me shell (and possibly in Windows 2000 Professional).

Conclusion?

Ordinarily I'd mumble something about how PNG has finally achieved massive studliness and will soon be taking over the world, but what the hell--it has, it is, and if it's not obvious from what I've already written, another couple of lines won't make any difference. Go forth, visit the web site, write code, make lots of PNGs, etc., etc.

And Microsoft, pleeeeease get on the ball with Internet Explorer for Windows and Unix...

Mozilla's latest milestone, M17, arrived today(ish); early adopters, go thou and download. And while you're waiting, check out this summary of the state of the art of PNG written by Greg Roelofs. PNG is ready for prime time in its Mozilla incarnation (though there are a few outstanding issues). Imminent takeover of the net predicted. Film at 11. Update later by J: OK, so M17 isn't available yet. Mea culpa; Greg and I misread a planning page. Here are Greg's comments/corrections to clear up the matter.

PNG, MNG, JNG and Mozilla M17
26 June 2000
by Greg Roelofs

PNG support in Mozilla has improved greatly over the last few releases ("milestones"), and with each milestone comes a corresponding Slashdot posting and a lot of discussion. Unfortunately, not all of the discussion is entirely accurate, so here's a preemptive posting that attempts to update folks on the status of PNG support in Mozilla and other apps and to clear up some of the more common misconceptions. (This seems to be an annual event...)

Home Page

First of all, the PNG home page got booted off of cdrom.com in early March, and in early May it settled into what should be its absolutely final home:

• http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/
• ftp://ftp.libpng.org/pub/png/

This is currently hosted on freesoftware.com, Walnut Creek CD-ROM's new site for free software (quel surprise!), but if something should ever happen to Walnut Creek, libpng.org will be redirected appropriately. (On a related note, the new zlib URL is http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/, which is also currently hosted on freesoftware.com.)

PNG Features for the Web

Insofar as this is ostensibly a Mozilla posting, let's have a brief rundown of the PNG features that are most useful to Web designers:

• alpha transparency - This is geek jargon for partial or variable transparency, and it lets you do nice effects that are independent of the background color(s), such as antialiased (non-jaggy) text, drop shadows, gradient fades, and translucency. PNG not only supports a full 8-bit alpha channel in grayscale and RGB images but also what amounts to an "RGBA palette" in colormapped images. The latter lets you do nice transparency without a huge hit in file size. For example, all but one of the transparent images on my PNG alpha-transparency test page are 8-bit or less; the lone exception (one of the toucans) is a 32-bit RGBA image, virtually indistinguishable from its 8-bit cousins. Note that PNG supports only unassociated (non-premultiplied) alpha, since the alternative is not lossless.

• gamma correction - Gamma allows you to display the same image on different platforms without looking too dark on some and too light on others. For best results it does require that both the designer's display system and the user's be calibrated, but even educated guessing is better than nothing in a viewing program (which is what Mozilla does). Warning! Watch out for Adobe Photoshop; version 5.0 had a serious factor-of-two bug in its PNG gamma support, and 4.0 also had some problems. (Things seem to be fixed in 5.5, however.)

• color correction - Where gamma has to do with image "brightness," color correction has to do with rendering shades of color precisely. PNG supports it, but not many applications do; it's pretty tricky to get right. Note that Photoshop 5.5 writes incorrect PNG "iCCP" chunks, and this will crash applications based on libpng 1.0.6. (Older versions of libpng ignore the chunk, and the soon-to-be-released libpng 1.0.7 will work around it.) Also note that feeding a valid iCCP chunk to PS 5.5 will hang it.

• compression - A lot of people have some seriously crazy ideas about PNG's compression. Here's the straight dope:
  • PNGs tend to be 15% to 20% smaller than equivalent GIFs on average. There are some GIFs, particularly 32- or 64-color ones, that are smaller than the best PNGs, but usually by only a couple of percent. There are also many that are more than twice as large as the corresponding PNGs, but these tend to be tiny images. (One exception is this image, which is dimensionally rather large yet only 1/3 the file size of the GIF version.)

  • PNGs tend to be much larger than standard JPEGs. JPEGs are lossy, while PNGs are lossless; for natural (photographic) material, no lossless format can compete with JPEG--PNGs will typically be 5 or 10 times as large. On the other hand, for simple graphics or text-filled images with relatively few colors and sharp edges, JPEG is much worse, both in quality and in file size. (This means you, Slackware guys!) Use the proper tool for the job--no single image format is best in all cases.

  • PNG is roughly comparable to JPEG-LS, the new lossless JPEG standard. On the Waterloo BragZone test suite, JPEG-LS beat PNG by 5% to 10% on natural images, but PNG beat JPEG-LS by 35% to 270% on "artistic" images. YMMV.

  • PNG's compression method can be implemented in such a way that it is completely free of all known patents, but it can also be implemented in such a way that it infringes on patents held by PKWARE, Stac and others. You can guess which way zlib was written. Folks who are neither rich nor expert in patent law should probably stick to zlib- and libpng-based implementations.

  • Unlike (LZW-based) GIF, in which the compression is basically deterministic--that is, you end up with pretty much the same data regardless of who does the compression--PNG's scheme leaves a lot of room for optimization. Some programs do a good job, some don't. The GIMP happens to be one of the good ones, as is pngcrush. Photoshop traditionally has been one of the not-so-good ones, although version 5.5 includes a "Save for Web" option that presumably invokes ImageReady. ImageReady 1.0 was mediocre and reportedly isn't much better in its current release (i.e., pngcrush beats it by 15% to 25%), but it is better than Photoshop's normal "Save as" option.

  • The compression engine can't help clueless users who perform apples-and-oranges comparisons. If you start with a truecolor image and save it as both GIF and PNG, chances are the PNG will be 24-bit while the GIF will be 8-bit. Guess what? It's pretty tough to overcome that initial 3:1 deficit, no matter how good your compression engine is. (If you're not sure what kind of PNGs you have, check!) Also don't add a lot of text annotations to the PNG--unless you do the same to the GIF--and especially don't add a useless alpha channel to opaque images! (That last is directed at the Burn All GIFs folks...) Recompressing an image after it's been through JPEG compression is also a bad idea; JPEG leaves a lot of nasty little artifacts (often invisible to the naked eye) that screw up non-JPEG compressors.

• interlacing - PNG's interlacing scheme is two-dimensional, much like progressive JPEG, but unlike GIF--which uses a one-dimensional, line-based scheme. The upshot is that an interlaced PNG with text in it will be readable roughly twice as soon as the corresponding interlaced GIF.

• animation - Nope. But see MNG, below.

• MIME type - image/png. If PNG images on your server show up as broken images within Web pages and as gobbledygook text when referenced directly (i.e., as standalone URLs), you probably don't have the MIME type set up correctly. On the other hand, if they show up correctly for MSIE and some versions of Netscape but not others, you're probably running Microsoft's IIS server. Technically it's a bug in older versions of Netscape (versions 4.04 through 4.5), but consider switching to Apache anyway...

• browser compatibility - We'll get to that in a moment.

PNG Extensions and the Future

PNG is extensible. PNG is lossless. PNG is a single-image, raster (bitmap) format. One of its overriding design goals was backward compatibility. As a result, don't expect to see any sort of lossy compression methods (JPEG is doing a fine job of that, with the exception of transparency--but see JNG, below). Also don't expect to see any vector-based extensions--SVG with gzip content-encoding has that covered. Indeed, don't expect to see any new, incompatible compression methods for quite a while. Until there are lossless methods that can, on average, halve the size of PNG images, the cost in software compatibility is far too great. (Keep in mind that there still browsers that don't support progressive JPEG, and that was a relatively trivial change! And let's not even talk about JPEG 2000...)

PNG is also not going to become an animated format. Leaving multiple-image support out of PNG was a conscious design decision by the PNG development group, and it's still the right decision. Overloading a still image format with animation or video features merely confuses users and Web browsers, which have no way to distinguish still images from animations without prying into the data streams (which usually means downloading them first). Developers who prefer to program monolithically can always program for MNG instead; it's architecturally identical to PNG, and PNG is a pure subset of MNG.

Related Formats

MNG: As the previous paragraph suggests, the animated version of PNG is called MNG, for Multiple-image Network Graphics. It supports looping (including nested loops), clipping, deltas, and other features, plus everything PNG supports--including alpha transparency, of course. The home page is here:

• http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/
• ftp://ftp.libpng.org/pub/mng/

Since this spring, a free reference library, libmng, has been under development by Gerard Juyn; its home page is at:

• http://www.libmng.com/

Note that the MIME type is video/x-mng; it has not yet been registered with the IETF. Undoubtedly there will be many misconfigured Web servers in coming years...

JNG: JNG is short for JPEG Network Graphics and is a proper subset of MNG, just as PNG is, but it's worth a separate mention. The idea is to combine the best of both worlds: JPEG's excellent compression and PNG's incredibly spiffy alpha transparency and color correction. JNG is almost identical to PNG, but in addition to standard IDAT chunks (which in JNG contain the alpha channel), there are also JDAT chunks that contain a standard JPEG/JFIF stream (suitable for handing off to libjpeg). From a developer's standpoint, if you've got support for both PNG alpha and ordinary JPEG/JFIF, adding JNG is a breeze. Of course, JNG is also supported by recent libmng betas. Its MIME type is image/x-jng.

Browser Status

Most browsers have supported PNG since at least late 1997 (when Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer finally did), but almost without exception, their support for alpha transparency has been abominable. Amazingly enough, it seems that 2000 may be the year that browsers finally support it, more or less ubiquitously. In April alone there were three newcomers, with another in May; so far this year, the total has more than doubled. Here's the current list of browsers that at least attempt to do alpha transparency correctly, with their supported platforms indicated in italics. If screen shots of the PNG alpha-transparency test page are available, they're linked to the browser name:

• Arena (Unix/X) - this was the first browser with good alpha support (at least for Unix, and I think anywhere). It died in 1998, however, and the final release tends to core-dump on PNG images. It always used its own "sandy" background pattern rather than that specified in the HTML. (Very old screen shot.)
• Browse (RISC OS) - Acorn's browser was the first to fully support PNG transparency and gamma correction, including background images, but it died along with Acorn itself in June 1999. The browser may or may not eventually show up in Pace Micro's digital set-top boxes. (Very old screen shot.)
• iCab (Macintosh) - this was the first Macintosh browser to support alpha transparency (since the 1.8 beta), but it doesn't do gamma correction yet.
• ICE Browser (Java) - ICEsoft's commercial browser for Java reportedly has full alpha support, but I haven't verified that.
• Internet Explorer (Macintosh) - version 5.0 added superb PNG support, including alpha, gamma and color correction. This is probably the best PNG-supporting browser available today. Unfortunately, the Windows and Unix versions seem to be a completely separate code base, so there's no telling when (or if) they'll have equally good support. (See the browsers page for details.)
• Konqueror (Unix/KDE) - I just heard that KDE's file-manager-cum-browser has full alpha support, but I haven't had a chance to check it myself. I'll try to get some screen shots added soon, however.
• Mozilla (Macintosh, Unix/X, Windows) - alpha was enabled in April, though there are a few gotchas: the Windows code is currently broken (bug 36694 and 19283, to be fixed by beta3), and the X code is a slightly nasty hack--it looks beautiful on 24-bit displays, but it's slow when scrolling, and the quality for users of 8- and 16-bit displays will be relatively poor. Nevertheless, it's a vast improvement over the previous code, and it's basically the only game in town for Unix users. Note that the infamous PNG interlacing bug (3195) was fixed in May, and Tim Rowley checked in initial MNG and JNG support on 12June.
• NetPositive (BeOS) - version 2.2, released in April, added support for alpha transparency; but like iCab, it doesn't yet do gamma correction. (It also doesn't display interlaced PNGs progressively.)
• Netscape - see Mozilla (which is basically what Navigator 6.0 will be).
• Sega Dreamcast Web Browser (Dreamcast) - version 2.0 of Planetweb's browser for the Sega Dreamcast game console, released in May, fully supports alpha transparency, but I don't have any screen shots yet.
• Webster XL (RISC OS) - R-Comp's RISC OS browser is claimed to have full alpha support, but I don't have verification, and it doesn't appear to be under development anymore.
• WebTV (WebTV) - surprisingly enough, WebTV has decent support for 32-bit RGBA PNGs, but its support for palette transparency is broken. In principle it should be easy to fix, but then again, it's a strange platform. (Note that the fonts look considerably better on a television screen.)

Honorable Mention goes to Siegel & Gale's PNG Live plug-in for Netscape, which was the only plug-in ever to manage alpha transparency (in Windows only). It died before ever getting out of beta, though, and plug-ins in general are useless for PNG. So is the HTML 4.0 OBJECT tag, but don't get me started...

Other Apps, Libs, etc.

I currently list some 500 distinct PNG-supporting packages (more if you break things like Microsoft Office into their constituent parts) in 8 categories (soon to be 9 or 10), not to mention a dozen pieces of hardware. PNG has now reached the point where even freeware authors generally don't bother to tell me when they've added support; it's largely taken for granted. (I do occasional Freshmeat sweeps, but I usually don't have time, and many entries don't mention PNG even if it's supported.) Quite a number of the apps include full source code, by the way--which is the way it should be, of course. ;-)

Within the libraries-and-toolkits category, there are a surprising number of independent PNG implementations (either encoders or decoders or both), including ones in C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Pascal, and even Ada95. PNG is now a standard part of Java 2 SE 1.3 and Tcl/Tk, and it is the main image format in the popular gd library and all of its Perl-based derivatives. In turn, this has led to its online use in areas as diverse as server statistics, chemical diagrams, computer-generated mazes, and weather maps.

Even better, PNG is the native, internal image format for a number of major applications (including Macromedia Fireworks and Microsoft Office), and it's becoming a popular icon format for advanced GUIs. It also ships as a standard part of BeOS, via the Translation Kit, and it's supported natively in the Windows Me shell (and possibly in Windows 2000 Professional).

Conclusion?

Ordinarily I'd mumble something about how PNG has finally achieved massive studliness and will soon be taking over the world, but what the hell--it has, it is, and if it's not obvious from what I've already written, another couple of lines won't make any difference. Go forth, visit the web site, write code, make lots of PNGs, etc., etc.

And Microsoft, pleeeeease get on the ball with Internet Explorer for Windows and Unix...

Mozilla's latest milestone, M17, arrived today(ish); early adopters, go thou and download. And while you're waiting, check out this summary of the state of the art of PNG written by Greg Roelofs. PNG is ready for prime time in its Mozilla incarnation (though there are a few outstanding issues). Imminent takeover of the net predicted. Film at 11. Update later by J: OK, so M17 isn't available yet. Mea culpa; Greg and I misread a planning page. Here are Greg's comments/corrections to clear up the matter.

PNG, MNG, JNG and Mozilla M17
26 June 2000
by Greg Roelofs

PNG support in Mozilla has improved greatly over the last few releases ("milestones"), and with each milestone comes a corresponding Slashdot posting and a lot of discussion. Unfortunately, not all of the discussion is entirely accurate, so here's a preemptive posting that attempts to update folks on the status of PNG support in Mozilla and other apps and to clear up some of the more common misconceptions. (This seems to be an annual event...)

Home Page

First of all, the PNG home page got booted off of cdrom.com in early March, and in early May it settled into what should be its absolutely final home:

• http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/
• ftp://ftp.libpng.org/pub/png/

This is currently hosted on freesoftware.com, Walnut Creek CD-ROM's new site for free software (quel surprise!), but if something should ever happen to Walnut Creek, libpng.org will be redirected appropriately. (On a related note, the new zlib URL is http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/, which is also currently hosted on freesoftware.com.)

PNG Features for the Web

Insofar as this is ostensibly a Mozilla posting, let's have a brief rundown of the PNG features that are most useful to Web designers:

• alpha transparency - This is geek jargon for partial or variable transparency, and it lets you do nice effects that are independent of the background color(s), such as antialiased (non-jaggy) text, drop shadows, gradient fades, and translucency. PNG not only supports a full 8-bit alpha channel in grayscale and RGB images but also what amounts to an "RGBA palette" in colormapped images. The latter lets you do nice transparency without a huge hit in file size. For example, all but one of the transparent images on my PNG alpha-transparency test page are 8-bit or less; the lone exception (one of the toucans) is a 32-bit RGBA image, virtually indistinguishable from its 8-bit cousins. Note that PNG supports only unassociated (non-premultiplied) alpha, since the alternative is not lossless.

• gamma correction - Gamma allows you to display the same image on different platforms without looking too dark on some and too light on others. For best results it does require that both the designer's display system and the user's be calibrated, but even educated guessing is better than nothing in a viewing program (which is what Mozilla does). Warning! Watch out for Adobe Photoshop; version 5.0 had a serious factor-of-two bug in its PNG gamma support, and 4.0 also had some problems. (Things seem to be fixed in 5.5, however.)

• color correction - Where gamma has to do with image "brightness," color correction has to do with rendering shades of color precisely. PNG supports it, but not many applications do; it's pretty tricky to get right. Note that Photoshop 5.5 writes incorrect PNG "iCCP" chunks, and this will crash applications based on libpng 1.0.6. (Older versions of libpng ignore the chunk, and the soon-to-be-released libpng 1.0.7 will work around it.) Also note that feeding a valid iCCP chunk to PS 5.5 will hang it.

• compression - A lot of people have some seriously crazy ideas about PNG's compression. Here's the straight dope:
  • PNGs tend to be 15% to 20% smaller than equivalent GIFs on average. There are some GIFs, particularly 32- or 64-color ones, that are smaller than the best PNGs, but usually by only a couple of percent. There are also many that are more than twice as large as the corresponding PNGs, but these tend to be tiny images. (One exception is this image, which is dimensionally rather large yet only 1/3 the file size of the GIF version.)

  • PNGs tend to be much larger than standard JPEGs. JPEGs are lossy, while PNGs are lossless; for natural (photographic) material, no lossless format can compete with JPEG--PNGs will typically be 5 or 10 times as large. On the other hand, for simple graphics or text-filled images with relatively few colors and sharp edges, JPEG is much worse, both in quality and in file size. (This means you, Slackware guys!) Use the proper tool for the job--no single image format is best in all cases.

  • PNG is roughly comparable to JPEG-LS, the new lossless JPEG standard. On the Waterloo BragZone test suite, JPEG-LS beat PNG by 5% to 10% on natural images, but PNG beat JPEG-LS by 35% to 270% on "artistic" images. YMMV.

  • PNG's compression method can be implemented in such a way that it is completely free of all known patents, but it can also be implemented in such a way that it infringes on patents held by PKWARE, Stac and others. You can guess which way zlib was written. Folks who are neither rich nor expert in patent law should probably stick to zlib- and libpng-based implementations.

  • Unlike (LZW-based) GIF, in which the compression is basically deterministic--that is, you end up with pretty much the same data regardless of who does the compression--PNG's scheme leaves a lot of room for optimization. Some programs do a good job, some don't. The GIMP happens to be one of the good ones, as is pngcrush. Photoshop traditionally has been one of the not-so-good ones, although version 5.5 includes a "Save for Web" option that presumably invokes ImageReady. ImageReady 1.0 was mediocre and reportedly isn't much better in its current release (i.e., pngcrush beats it by 15% to 25%), but it is better than Photoshop's normal "Save as" option.

  • The compression engine can't help clueless users who perform apples-and-oranges comparisons. If you start with a truecolor image and save it as both GIF and PNG, chances are the PNG will be 24-bit while the GIF will be 8-bit. Guess what? It's pretty tough to overcome that initial 3:1 deficit, no matter how good your compression engine is. (If you're not sure what kind of PNGs you have, check!) Also don't add a lot of text annotations to the PNG--unless you do the same to the GIF--and especially don't add a useless alpha channel to opaque images! (That last is directed at the Burn All GIFs folks...) Recompressing an image after it's been through JPEG compression is also a bad idea; JPEG leaves a lot of nasty little artifacts (often invisible to the naked eye) that screw up non-JPEG compressors.

• interlacing - PNG's interlacing scheme is two-dimensional, much like progressive JPEG, but unlike GIF--which uses a one-dimensional, line-based scheme. The upshot is that an interlaced PNG with text in it will be readable roughly twice as soon as the corresponding interlaced GIF.

• animation - Nope. But see MNG, below.

• MIME type - image/png. If PNG images on your server show up as broken images within Web pages and as gobbledygook text when referenced directly (i.e., as standalone URLs), you probably don't have the MIME type set up correctly. On the other hand, if they show up correctly for MSIE and some versions of Netscape but not others, you're probably running Microsoft's IIS server. Technically it's a bug in older versions of Netscape (versions 4.04 through 4.5), but consider switching to Apache anyway...

• browser compatibility - We'll get to that in a moment.

PNG Extensions and the Future

PNG is extensible. PNG is lossless. PNG is a single-image, raster (bitmap) format. One of its overriding design goals was backward compatibility. As a result, don't expect to see any sort of lossy compression methods (JPEG is doing a fine job of that, with the exception of transparency--but see JNG, below). Also don't expect to see any vector-based extensions--SVG with gzip content-encoding has that covered. Indeed, don't expect to see any new, incompatible compression methods for quite a while. Until there are lossless methods that can, on average, halve the size of PNG images, the cost in software compatibility is far too great. (Keep in mind that there still browsers that don't support progressive JPEG, and that was a relatively trivial change! And let's not even talk about JPEG 2000...)

PNG is also not going to become an animated format. Leaving multiple-image support out of PNG was a conscious design decision by the PNG development group, and it's still the right decision. Overloading a still image format with animation or video features merely confuses users and Web browsers, which have no way to distinguish still images from animations without prying into the data streams (which usually means downloading them first). Developers who prefer to program monolithically can always program for MNG instead; it's architecturally identical to PNG, and PNG is a pure subset of MNG.

Related Formats

MNG: As the previous paragraph suggests, the animated version of PNG is called MNG, for Multiple-image Network Graphics. It supports looping (including nested loops), clipping, deltas, and other features, plus everything PNG supports--including alpha transparency, of course. The home page is here:

• http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/
• ftp://ftp.libpng.org/pub/mng/

Since this spring, a free reference library, libmng, has been under development by Gerard Juyn; its home page is at:

• http://www.libmng.com/

Note that the MIME type is video/x-mng; it has not yet been registered with the IETF. Undoubtedly there will be many misconfigured Web servers in coming years...

JNG: JNG is short for JPEG Network Graphics and is a proper subset of MNG, just as PNG is, but it's worth a separate mention. The idea is to combine the best of both worlds: JPEG's excellent compression and PNG's incredibly spiffy alpha transparency and color correction. JNG is almost identical to PNG, but in addition to standard IDAT chunks (which in JNG contain the alpha channel), there are also JDAT chunks that contain a standard JPEG/JFIF stream (suitable for handing off to libjpeg). From a developer's standpoint, if you've got support for both PNG alpha and ordinary JPEG/JFIF, adding JNG is a breeze. Of course, JNG is also supported by recent libmng betas. Its MIME type is image/x-jng.

Browser Status

Most browsers have supported PNG since at least late 1997 (when Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer finally did), but almost without exception, their support for alpha transparency has been abominable. Amazingly enough, it seems that 2000 may be the year that browsers finally support it, more or less ubiquitously. In April alone there were three newcomers, with another in May; so far this year, the total has more than doubled. Here's the current list of browsers that at least attempt to do alpha transparency correctly, with their supported platforms indicated in italics. If screen shots of the PNG alpha-transparency test page are available, they're linked to the browser name:

• Arena (Unix/X) - this was the first browser with good alpha support (at least for Unix, and I think anywhere). It died in 1998, however, and the final release tends to core-dump on PNG images. It always used its own "sandy" background pattern rather than that specified in the HTML. (Very old screen shot.)
• Browse (RISC OS) - Acorn's browser was the first to fully support PNG transparency and gamma correction, including background images, but it died along with Acorn itself in June 1999. The browser may or may not eventually show up in Pace Micro's digital set-top boxes. (Very old screen shot.)
• iCab (Macintosh) - this was the first Macintosh browser to support alpha transparency (since the 1.8 beta), but it doesn't do gamma correction yet.
• ICE Browser (Java) - ICEsoft's commercial browser for Java reportedly has full alpha support, but I haven't verified that.
• Internet Explorer (Macintosh) - version 5.0 added superb PNG support, including alpha, gamma and color correction. This is probably the best PNG-supporting browser available today. Unfortunately, the Windows and Unix versions seem to be a completely separate code base, so there's no telling when (or if) they'll have equally good support. (See the browsers page for details.)
• Konqueror (Unix/KDE) - I just heard that KDE's file-manager-cum-browser has full alpha support, but I haven't had a chance to check it myself. I'll try to get some screen shots added soon, however.
• Mozilla (Macintosh, Unix/X, Windows) - alpha was enabled in April, though there are a few gotchas: the Windows code is currently broken (bug 36694 and 19283, to be fixed by beta3), and the X code is a slightly nasty hack--it looks beautiful on 24-bit displays, but it's slow when scrolling, and the quality for users of 8- and 16-bit displays will be relatively poor. Nevertheless, it's a vast improvement over the previous code, and it's basically the only game in town for Unix users. Note that the infamous PNG interlacing bug (3195) was fixed in May, and Tim Rowley checked in initial MNG and JNG support on 12June.
• NetPositive (BeOS) - version 2.2, released in April, added support for alpha transparency; but like iCab, it doesn't yet do gamma correction. (It also doesn't display interlaced PNGs progressively.)
• Netscape - see Mozilla (which is basically what Navigator 6.0 will be).
• Sega Dreamcast Web Browser (Dreamcast) - version 2.0 of Planetweb's browser for the Sega Dreamcast game console, released in May, fully supports alpha transparency, but I don't have any screen shots yet.
• Webster XL (RISC OS) - R-Comp's RISC OS browser is claimed to have full alpha support, but I don't have verification, and it doesn't appear to be under development anymore.
• WebTV (WebTV) - surprisingly enough, WebTV has decent support for 32-bit RGBA PNGs, but its support for palette transparency is broken. In principle it should be easy to fix, but then again, it's a strange platform. (Note that the fonts look considerably better on a television screen.)

Honorable Mention goes to Siegel & Gale's PNG Live plug-in for Netscape, which was the only plug-in ever to manage alpha transparency (in Windows only). It died before ever getting out of beta, though, and plug-ins in general are useless for PNG. So is the HTML 4.0 OBJECT tag, but don't get me started...

Other Apps, Libs, etc.

I currently list some 500 distinct PNG-supporting packages (more if you break things like Microsoft Office into their constituent parts) in 8 categories (soon to be 9 or 10), not to mention a dozen pieces of hardware. PNG has now reached the point where even freeware authors generally don't bother to tell me when they've added support; it's largely taken for granted. (I do occasional Freshmeat sweeps, but I usually don't have time, and many entries don't mention PNG even if it's supported.) Quite a number of the apps include full source code, by the way--which is the way it should be, of course. ;-)

Within the libraries-and-toolkits category, there are a surprising number of independent PNG implementations (either encoders or decoders or both), including ones in C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Pascal, and even Ada95. PNG is now a standard part of Java 2 SE 1.3 and Tcl/Tk, and it is the main image format in the popular gd library and all of its Perl-based derivatives. In turn, this has led to its online use in areas as diverse as server statistics, chemical diagrams, computer-generated mazes, and weather maps.

Even better, PNG is the native, internal image format for a number of major applications (including Macromedia Fireworks and Microsoft Office), and it's becoming a popular icon format for advanced GUIs. It also ships as a standard part of BeOS, via the Translation Kit, and it's supported natively in the Windows Me shell (and possibly in Windows 2000 Professional).

Conclusion?

Ordinarily I'd mumble something about how PNG has finally achieved massive studliness and will soon be taking over the world, but what the hell--it has, it is, and if it's not obvious from what I've already written, another couple of lines won't make any difference. Go forth, visit the web site, write code, make lots of PNGs, etc., etc.

And Microsoft, pleeeeease get on the ball with Internet Explorer for Windows and Unix...

HoserHead writes: "For those who are really worried about the Unisys patent on LZW compression in GIF files, the answer may soon be at hand: MNG is on the way. PNG has a brother in MNG, which is the free alternative to animated GIFs. Tim Rowley has recently sent Mozilla hackers a checkin of preliminary MNG support, as can be read here (Necko/Imglib section). Now, all that's needed is MNG export support for the GIMP!"

Mozilla M16 Builds are now up at the Mozilla FTP site. Check your local mirror first! This release supposedly has the switchable skins stuff in there. You can also read the release notes if you're interested in some details.

Mozilla M16 Builds are now up at the Mozilla FTP site. Check your local mirror first! This release supposedly has the switchable skins stuff in there. You can also read the release notes if you're interested in some details.

Mozilla M16 Builds are now up at the Mozilla FTP site. Check your local mirror first! This release supposedly has the switchable skins stuff in there. You can also read the release notes if you're interested in some details.

Cioby writes: "No news on the homepage (yet), but on [the mozilla.org nightly builds page] M16 builds started to appear. Go Mozilla, GO! :)" True enough -- though M15 is the latest milestone listed, M16 has been available from the nightly builds for over a month. M16 rocks pretty well, too, though I haven't tried out its transparent gif feature yet. Hard to complain about a nightly release schedule ... [Updated 8:50GMT by timothy] (Sigh) -- Yes, that ought to say "transparent png," not gif. Guess I haven't tried that either.

Snorfle writes: "In the recent Mozilla status update, there's a mention that real 8-bit alpha-channel support went quietly into Mozilla last week. Web-publishing types have been crying for this feature, provided principally through (royalty free!) PNG, though other alpha-capable formats will work too." All I want now is anti-aliased fonts for christmas.

We got a lot of (shall we say) slightly impertinent questions for Web Standards Project co-founder Jeffrey Zeldman, but that's okay. He reads Slashdot and knows the nature of the beast, and he's hard-core enough to give as good as he gets. So set your humor module to high, then sit back and enjoy Mr. Zeldman's (appropriately impertinent) answers to the 12 questions we forwarded to him.

1) Here's my question:
(Score:5, Insightful)
by FascDot Killed My Pr

If you're such a hotshot web designer, why have you committed one of the cardinal sins of web design: Putting an "entry page" that does nothing but suck bandwidth and make it difficult to "back" out of a site?

Jeffrey:

I'll answer this one piece by piece.

"If you're such a hotshot web designer."

Never claimed to be. Roblimo wrote that glowing description. It's not surprising that some of you, who have no idea what I do, were pissed off when those words of high praise took you to a very simple, low-bandwidth, personal site.

I wish Rob had said "Zeldman is a co-founder of The Web Standards Project" (WaSP), and had explained what the WaSP does, maybe even mentioning the role we played in getting Netscape to throw out its old rendering engine and begin building Mozilla around the standards-compliant Gecko core. I'm guessing people would have overlooked my supposed "design sins" or their distaste for the color orange on my personal site if they had a better idea about what I actually do.

For those who don't know, the WaSP organized a petition drive to persuade Netscape to throw out its old rendering engine and build its new browser around Gecko. Then-group-leader George Olsen of WaSP, along with ThunderLizard's Jim Heid, got 2,000 developers to sign the petition. Netscape is a company that listens - at least, for the last two years, it has been listening - and you all know the result: an upcoming browser that is designed to fully comply with HTML 4, CSS-1, the W3C DOM, XML, and EcmaScript.

No disrespect to Roblimo either. I dig the guy. And what he said is true in a sense. I *am* a web designer and writer, and a lot of the work I've done over the past five years *has* gotten imitated, for better or worse. For instance, oddly enough, the original Mozilla.org (http://www.mozilla.org) was copied from the simple HTML-and-CSS layout I did The Web Standards Project (http://www.webstandards.org/): from the technique, to the color palette, to the crude four-pixel black outlines around content areas. Don't bother checking; the new Mozilla layout has evolved away from that original look, though it still bears trace elements of the original design. A lot of you probably do remember the original Mozilla layout. I'm sure when Roblimo saw it, he realized it was copied from http://www.webstandards.org and I think that's the kind of thing he was referring to in his overly kind introduction to my work.

By the way, I wasn't upset by what Mozilla did; I was flattered by it. You may think it is ugly design, though I'm sure that none of you said so to Mozilla because you believe in the project. It's weird to me that the same people who dig Mozilla would be rude in their comments to someone who, at least in a small way, helped influence the direction of that browser, and who also influenced the initial DESIGN of that project, but whatever. I also talk with Microsoft, because the goal of WaSP is to get standards in *all* browsers, and the fact that I talk to engineers at that company may make me evil incarnate in your book. I can deal with that. If we get better browsers, I'll be satisfied.

I do get copied a lot and often those copies are better than the original. In that sense "VIEW SOURCE" functions like "OPEN SOURCE." ;) I am happy when someone takes an idea of mine and makes it better (and their own).

"why have you committed one of the cardinal sins of web design"

I've been designing websites for five years. I don't claim to be a genius and I'm far from the best designer on the planet, but your take on cardinal sins of a profession you do not participate in is about as meaningful as my comments on your programming decisions would be.

You are parroting Jakob Nielsen or some other expert whose work you've read. You haven't read my work on the same subject (no problem) and you don't know my work as a designer (no problem). Just as in programming, design is about decisions. A designer never sins. He/she makes informed decisions. If you get to know the work, you may understand why those decisions were made. If you never bother to engage with the work - if you merely believe that all design must conform with a small set of rules written by one or two people - you don't understand the nature of the thing you are criticizing. Especially if you spend all of five seconds looking at it, and then rush to be the first to post a rant. There are rules of grammar, too, and James Joyce threw them all out. True, I ain't him. But I am me. All designers make decisions, and if the entire web looked like http://www.useit.com I don't think that would be such a great thing. Anything that departs from the look of http://www.useit.com is violating at least a few of Jakob's "rules," and that's the nature of the beast.

"Putting [up] an 'entry page' that does nothing but suck bandwidth and make it difficult to "back" out of a site?"

The bandwidth sucked is exactly 4K. I think you can handle it.

The "entry page" is a temporary placeholder while I rethink the front end of my personal site. Notice the words "temporary," "placeholder," and "personal." The previous front page was navigational in nature, and it is archived at http://www.zeldman.com/mozillatest.html . The name refers to the fact that the page revealed a bug in recent builds of Mozilla. I have left it online so the Mozilla folks can use it to track down and fix that bug, which they are doing now.

Recently, I've been focused on WaSP and A List Apart (http://www.alistapart.com/), a web design magazine and mailing list I co-founded with Brian Platz. The content on my personal site (275+ pages) has not been my most recent focus, so I determined a while back that it was silly to stop the visitor with a primarily navigational page. I should explain that some people visit zeldman.com for entertainment like The Ad Graveyard; a completely different audience visits for web design info, such as the Ask Dr Web tutorial; and so on. To accommodate those very different visitors, I initially had a core page that was navigational. I didn't put real content on page one, because I was accommodating maybe six completely different audiences, and there was nothing in all that content that would appeal to ALL of them. On http://www.alistapart.com/ I start with content on page one, because the audience is more unified.

Even that old navigational page (http://www.zeldman.com/mozillatest.html), with all its rollovers etc., was very low-bandwidth. I recently got to look at it while stuck at an airport in Stockholm. The airport had five Windows boxes sharing one 56K modem. I looked at some of my favorite sites, and they were all crawling onto the screen. I was pleased that my own front page loaded instantly. I design for low bandwidth, which explains why my work rarely looks like that of "such a hot shit designer." Back to the point. I haven't yet figured out how to restructure the front end of my site, so I put up a 4K placeholder with a bone-simple rollover and a 6 second refresh to the single page at my site that I have been focusing on lately.

Now you know why I have a temporary entry page; now you know why it does "nothing" (it is temporary, and what it does is redirect you); and now you know that it does not suck bandwidth.

How it "makes it difficult to 'back' out of the site" is a mystery to me, so I can't comment on that clause in your question. Personally I find database driven pages much harder to navigate and back out of than 4K html pages. And with browsers that suck, frames-based pages can also be tough to navigate. My 4K page is frameless HTML.

2) I have a question:
(Score:4, Insightful)
by Skinka

What's with that small font www.zeldman.com, haven't you read any (web) usability guides?

Jeffrey:

Yes, I've read them, yes I've written on the subject, yes yes yes.

Along with another WaSP member, I helped influence Microsoft to make ALL web text resizable by the user in IE5/Mac for reasons of accessibility and usability, and we are hoping to get the same from Mozilla. (At the moment, this feature is only available in IE5/Mac. It should be in every browser. It's not in the Windows version of IE and it's obviously not in the current version of Navigator.)

Why small fonts? Personal design decision on a personal site. You can enlarge the type in some browsers, not all. That day is coming.

There are methods of CSS that allow you to resize type in *all* browsers.

Why do I often avoid those methods?

Because they are not supported in most "CSS-capable" browsers.

Absolute font-size keywords are broken in Navigator 4 (all platforms) and IE5/Windows.

Percentages and ems are broken in Netscape 4.

Points are meaningless on computer screens, and the reliance on points in Style Sheets is a widespread authoring error.

Until all browsers support standards, designers will be stuck using pixels or FONT SIZE tags. Or simply making no effort at all to control the appearance and size of type on the web page. If this bothers you, join The Web Standards Project.

(Warning: it is orange. If you "can't get past the color" then I guess you'll have to let big browser companies determine the fate of the web.)

Unless you design web sites every day, you have no idea of the compatibility nightmares involved. But in your own work, I'm sure you have plenty of examples of brain-dead decisions by others that force you to use hacks and workarounds. It's the same in web design.

At the moment, the main text at http://www.zeldman.com/coming.html (the one page in all my work that most Slashdotters seem to have looked at) is laid out with ems. This is wonderful, scalable technology. You can easily enlarge or reduce the type in just about any browser.

Except, of course, that it doesn't work at all in most versions of Navigator 4. If you're using Navigator - and you know you are - you will see large ugly type, not the type treatment I intended. Until we have standards, that's just the way it will be.

3) Not to flame, but...
(Score:5, Insightful)
by mr.nobody

I find it hard to ask HTML questions to someone who has committed the cardinal sin of taking away the status bar with JavaScript.

Jeffrey:

Another cardinal sin.

Hmm. Let's see.

The status bar *does* reveal the url of the page it links to - just like an untreated status bar would do. It also provides ADDITIONAL INFORMATION AND COMMENTARY. I guess that's a bad thing. I can't see why, but I guess I'll take your word for it. URL = good, URL + additional information = bad. Because you say so.

The title tag also provides additional information, but Question #12 told me that that was okay, even good. Whew! That's a relief.

4) where's the interview
(Score:4, Interesting)
by geekpress

Jeff, I programmed for a web design company in which design issues totally trumped more practical concerns like download time. (In one case, I was forced to create absurdly complex html tables just so that the designer could get his one-pixel rounded corners on his notecard design.) What do you see as the appropriate balance between aesthetics and practical usability?

P.S. That company is now out of business, thank goodness!

Jeffrey:

I almost always design for low bandwidth.

I was creative director at a web firm and had designed a layout with thin black borders (yes I do this same thing over and over again) for a database driven site that would be creating tables on the fly. The design effect would not render in Navigator, but the page still looked fine in Navigator, even without those little black outlines.

It was possible to FORCE Navigator to display the effect by surrounding every table with an additional, empty table. That is sometimes okay, obviously - I've been doing it since we could begin applying rudimentary styling to tables - but on a large page full of data, it would unnecessarily increase the bandwidth per page, force all browsers to burn cycles as they calculated the appearance of complex table-in-table displays, possibly cause display errors, and completely yoke the content to the presentation, making it that much harder to fix later, when we have better browsers.

So I told the company president it was a usability nightmare and a waste of resources and bandwidth and therefore not worth doing.

He told me to do it anyway.

So I quit my job and started my own company.

Rounded edges, high bandwidth, all that stuff can be fine in the right situations, as long as alternatives are provided and rules of accessibility are respected. Usually I persuade my clients to go in the low-bandwidth direction, and I almost always go low-bandwidth on the noncommercial sites I do (zeldman.com, http://www.webstandards.org/ and http://www.alistapart.com/ ).

But high bandwidth is fine for the right audience. Consider http://www.praystation.com, which is a brilliantly designed site by Joshua Davis. It's amazing work. The audience for that site is primarily Joshua's fellow designers, and most of them have T1 or DSL access. Since the site's goal is to push design as far as it can go on the web, and since the audience is known to have fast connections and a desire to see great design, there is absolutely nothing wrong (and lot right) with the higher-bandwidth road taken by this project.

5) Optimism?
(Score:5, Funny)
by Chalst

How hopeful are you that Microsoft can be coaxed into making IE standards compliant? What exactly do you think Microsoft's motive was in not supporting HTML 4.0 completely?

Jeffrey:

It varies by the hour. Sometimes I think they are going to do this and simply have not committed to it because they're not sure they can pull it off. Sometimes I suspect that as the current market leader (guys with the most users) they think they don't have to bother with this. ("Our way *is* the standard." That kind of thinking.) And sometimes I reckon that they're doing this to fuck up Mozilla. ("You're going to support standards? Well, we have more users. You lose.") I don't *know* what they're thinking, but I suspect that different people there are thinking combinations of all the above.

I do know there are engineers there who are committed to supporting standards. Not only because I've met some of them through my work with WaSP, but also because - in the case of IE5/Mac - they've actually pulled it off. Remember, Microsoft (along with Netscape, Sun, invited experts, etc.) helped come up with these standards in the first place. Why would you design blueprints and then not follow them when you build the house? The engineers who participate in the standards process are committed to complying with standards. Some people in management may not be. Or they may be delaying, for short-sighted competitive reasons, or from fear of committing until they are sure they can do it right.

HTML 4 - the LAST HTML - includes dozens of accessibility improvements, and it is insane for any company not to fully support that. Without full support for HTML 4, millions of web users get hurt. That's morally wrong, and it's also just plain bad for business. I think that in time, all browser companies, including Microsoft, will come to see that. I also think the W3C's recent hiring of a conformance manager (http://xmlhack.com/read.php?item=517) signals that the W3C will soon take a more active role in "helping" companies get with the program, support standards, and stop screwing up developers and web users in a game where everybody - including the browser companies - eventually loses.

6) Balancing Technologies
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Proteus

As you are no doubt aware, the technology that drives web site design is advancing rapidly. However, there are still a lot of users who run older browsers, or prefer to use text-only browsers such as Lynx.

Obviously, one wants to reach as large an audience as possible, but not "lag behind" too far. How do you go about balancing the use of newer technology on a site without alienating users of older software, disabled users, and text-only browsers?

Jeffrey:

Using HTML 4, ALT tags, and the TITLE tag goes a long way toward achieving this goal.

So does using CSS for type, instead of FONT FACE and FONT SIZE tags that yoke content to presentation.

I do both these things, and all the other little things you have to do, for instance with framesets. I think there may be some really old (1996) framesets at zeldman.com where I left out full content inside the noframes tags. I'm cleaning that up as quickly as I can. At ALA http://www.alistapart.com/), wherever I used framesets, I included the full text inside the noframes tags, and I also included TEXT versions of all articles.

The next stage is full separation of content from structure, and that means using HTML 4 and CSS (and eventually, replacing HTML 4 with XHTML; and eventually, migrating to XML).

We can't safely do that yet. Gecko is still in development, Netscape 4 has appalling "support" for CSS, IE5/Windows has better but far from complete support, and the only released browser that gets it right - IE5/Mac - has a 6% market share.

SOON. Not soon enough, but SOON, we will look back on this era of stupidity and laugh. Oh, how we will laugh. This is the TRON era and we are striving to reach the MATRIX era.

7) Reverse scenario question...
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Jonny Royale

Have you ever seen anything come from a browser publisher "extending" a standard (Microsoft, Netscape, other), and thought "Gee, I wish that was in the standard"? Examples?

Jeffrey:

Yes.

LOW SRC was a funky old tag from Netscape (dating back to Netscape 1.1) that allowed you to slip a low-bandwidth image into place, and then have it replaced by the more bandwidth-intensive image when the latter finished downloading. For people with very slow connections, it was a useful hack. It also enabled creative web designers to add a certain amount of "SFX magic" (cough) to even the most primitive pages, viewed by the oldest browsers, under the most adverse conditions. That's gone. Too bad. I miss it.

Because of browser offsets in all released versions of Navigator and most versions of Explorer, I wish the "four horsemen of non-validation" (leftmargin, topmargin marginwidth and marginheight) had made it into HTML 4.0 transitional. We won't need them eventually, but until the browsers are smarter, we still do need them. The W3C is always ahead of what the browsers can deliver, of course; but by discouraging these dumb proprietary tags, the W3C has put us in the position where PAGES THAT WILL NOT WORK without these tags will fail at http://validator.w3.org. That kind of failure discourages developers from building standards-compliant pages. It is a small thing, and it is transitional, but DURING THE TRANSITION, I would have liked to see those four stupid tags get approval with a benevolent sigh.

On the other hand, designers who know what they are doing may include these tags and ignore those validation errors, but don't tell the W3C I said so.

Given the brain-dead way Navigator 4 and IE4/5/Windows handled absolute font size keywords in CSS, I *sometimes* wish font size tags were not discouraged YET. I hate them and hardly ever use them, but (for instance) there's no way to get small type in Linux that is actually READABLE without relying on these dumb old non-standard tags. What I really wish in this case, of course, is that Netscape and Microsoft hadn't fucked up this simple CSS technology. So I take the FONT SIZE tags thing back. Uh, never mind. I just wish Netscape and Microsoft had gotten CSS right the first time.

8) Banners
(Score:5, Interesting)
by TheTomcat

This is only vaguely related to design, but directly related to the web, and functionality.

We all know that banners don't work anymore. The only way a business can profit from banners is to show thousands per day. Most users don't even SEE banners anymore. We avoid them the same way we dig in the couch for the remote when commercials interrupt The Simpsons.

Do you have any suggestions to make future, content-based sites profitable?

Jeffrey:

There are several issues here. One is, a lot of the best work is done as a labor of love, and always will be. Those who need a revenue model before they are willing to even think about working will lose one of the golden opportunities of the web, which is free expression and the building of communities, regardless of financial issues. For instance, Slashdot was born as a community and still is one. Eventually, Slashdot got into a position where it could make money, but Slashdot is true to itself and was not corrupted or changed by any commercial considerations. So it is possible to make a good thing and not blow it when the cash register starts jingling. But a lot of other sites and communities have turned to dreck when money was involved.

We all agree that banners suck - Roblimo even wrote an article for ALA on that subject, back when ALA was just getting launched. With a big enough readership, banners *can* be profitable, as they are at Slashdot. But I agree that most of us just hate 'em.

Sponsorships are another possible means of revenue. "This issue of Webmonkey brought to you by Hewlett-Packard." With an entertaining HP minisite available at the click of a link, for those who care. Kaliber 10000 (http://www.k10k.net) has gotten Apple sponsorship, and all that means is, there's a tiny Apple link in the top right hand corner of the front page. If you click it, you get a popup window with text on why the site's designers like their Macs, and links to some current movies in Apple Quicktime format.

The Cluetrain guys have spoken about this model of corporate sponsorship as well.

I think about it sometimes. For instance, http://www.alistapart.com/ could be "brought to you by" Macromedia or Adobe. But to tell the truth, I don't really pursue this idea because I'm not motivated by money when it comes to creating web content. I simply want to create or choose the right content, and totally control it, and I'm not sanguine that I could do that if I *had* corporate sponsorship. Thinking about it some more is on my to-do list, but it's about 500 layers down in the list. I make enough money designing websites that I don't worry about "revenue models" for my content sites. It is a real issue, though. Just one I haven't bothered with personally, yet.

9) Jeff, your CSS suck
(Score:4, Insightful)
by Nicolas MONNET

I quote from your website:

H1 {font: bold 24px verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; margin-top: 0xp;}
H4 {font: 12px verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px;}

So why, tell me, WHY did you use PIXELS (px) instead of POINTS (pt), thereby overriding my painfully crafted DPI settings, rendering your all page unviewable on my Linux machine?

Jeffrey:

Refer to the answer to Question 2. Also refer to this Word from the WaSP column:

http://www.webstandards.org/wfw/ieah.html

The best way to style text - and the way the W3C recommends - is to use relative sizes or absolute size keywords.

Both these methods are completely broken in Navigator 4. Totally frickin' useless. Don't shoot the messenger. Netscape agrees, and that's why they threw out their old rendering engine and started from scratch.

And absolute size keywords are stupidly mis-supported in IE4/5 for Windows, where "medium" means large, and "small" means medium.

Faced with this maddening stupidity on the part of browser makers, designers/developers have two choices:

Do not style text at all. Have a nice day.

*OR* rely on pixels, which work in all "CSS-capable" browsers.

I sadly choose the latter until the browsers fully comply with W3C standards.

As to POINTS versus pixels, points are absolutely meaningless on the web, and the fact that they are used by thousands of developers who should know better proves only how little CSS is understood by the development community.

Certain point sizes may work on your platform in your style sheet. That proves that certain point sizes work on your platform in your style sheet. Cross-platform it is not transportable, and points are print-based units of measurement that have no meaningful relationship to the wonderful world of monitor resolution.

For a good discussion of CSS problems, see Todd Fahrner's "Beyond the Font Size Tag: Practical HTML Text and Styling" at http://style.metrius.com/font_size /livetext.html (Unfortunately, even some of *THESE* techniques do not work in more recent versions of Navigator 4.)

In a few months, there will be exactly two browsers that get CSS-1 right: Mozilla/Nav 6 for all platforms, and IE5/Mac which we have now. Since neither has dominant marketshare, developers will still face huge obstacles when trying to do something as SIMPLE and BASIC as size text on the web. Many will stick with pixels, which are the only CSS technique that actually WORKS across browsers and platforms.

In addition to all these nightmarish problems with our browsers, there are special challenges with Linux, because unless Linux users install additional scalable fonts, you can follow all the rules for good CSS, and avoid "problem" font sizes, and still create pages that look jaggy or are unreadable on a lot of people's machines. I worry about this all the time, but I don't have a solution for it. I have actually gone back to using the stupid The way to advance the medium is to get absolute font size keywords and relative font sizes right in CSS, finish implementing HTML 4, and give us the W3C DOM, XML, and EcmaScript. (And then wait two years for users to upgrade.)

10) Pixel based alignment and HTML
(Score:4, Insightful)
by mcelrath

One of the most disturbing trends that I see in web design these days is the trend toward trying to control layout at the pixel level. As HTML (Hypertext Markup) was not intended to be a graphics language, what is your comment on this?

Jeffrey:

Separation of style and content is the way forward.

The problem is the browsers.

When I revised my "Ask Dr Web" tutorial at http://www.zeldman.com/askdrweb/, along with other pages at http://www.zeldman.com/, to use CSS layouts instead of tables, certain versions of Navigator 4 began crashing.

Actually crashing from basic CSS-1.

I wrote about this at A List Apart, ("The Day the Browser Died") and because of this, Netscape invested some time and resources to fixing some of these bugs in Navigator 4. It didn't catch them all, and it didn't catch them in Linux. These bugs will never be fully fixed in Navigator 4, because Netscape is wisely spending its energy to finish the Mozilla browser. Unfortunately, this means that Netscape users will continue to face serious usability hazards throughout the web until Netscape 6 is released ... *OR* it means that developers will continue to use TABLES for layouts for the next two years (as Jakob Nielsen has predicted).

If you look at these pages - http://www.zeldman.com/steal.html or http://www.zeldman.com/icon.html are other examples - you will see that we are talking about extremely BASIC layouts. An expert from the CSS pointers group actually volunteered hours of her time trying alternate combinations of the very basic CSS on those pages to see if she could find ways to stop Netscape from crashing. She could not; neither could I. Netscape did what it could for its 4.0 users, but it can't do anything more until the next generation is released.

On my personal site I made the tough decision to leave these pages as-is. I don't have time to recode them all using tables.

You can agree or disagree with that decision.

Linux folks can either use the Mozilla or Opera betas to navigate those pages in safety and comfort.

It's worth noting that W3C pages also crashed Netscape 4, for the same reason.

What happens when Netscape's browser is this badly damaged? I get hate mail from people who don't understand the issues involved. I also got a letter of thanks from Netscape's Eric Krock, because good companies WANT us to help them find bugs in their software.

As an example of this, many sites (including yours) use font size=1 to acheive a font that is fairly uniform in pixel size across browsers. Anyone with a high-resolution screen will tell you that this is highly annoying, since it results in an almost unreadable font.

See above for the explanation as to why developers are stuck using 1994 technology to support late-1990s browsers. The same questions, the same answers.

The good thing - the ONLY good thing - about the font size tag is that it is user-resizable. The rest of this has been answered above.

Forcing netscape to use a larger font size often destroys the layout of the page. What's worse, some pages use dynamic fonts and other features to force this on the user.

Right, although in some cases it is justified.

As another example, many pages use the table , and layer to specify the exact size in pixels of portions of the page, and then put a little notice at the bottom ("This site best viewed at 800x600") or some such.

Yes, that is usually a bad design decision. Whenever possible, I use what Glenn Davis (WaSP and Project Cool co-founder) calls "liquid" design ... design that reflows to exactly fit the visitor's monitor. That's almost always a better way to go. Examples of my liquid designs include http://www.alistapart.com/, http://www.the-adstore.com, and most of zeldman.com. If you dig long enough in zeldman.com, you'll come upon pages older than the NYC subways, that simply use BAD design ... though at the time, it wasn't all that bad.

Liquid design is not always appropriate but it is generally best.

What are standards groups doing to fix this?

Nothing. The W3C can't make better or more intelligent designers out of people, and neither can the WaSP, whose sole purpose is to agitate for W3C standards in browsers (and eventually in web authoring tools).

We can try to lead by example. http://www.webstandards.org/ is liquid (aside from the front page, which is "semi-liquid" owing to the large low-rez graphic) and it validates.

MEMBERS of standards groups can write articles on the subject and hope that people read them. Of course, if people "can't get past" a 4k splash page, they will not learn about my articles on the subject.

Will I be looking at pages designed for 800x600 (or worse, 640x480) with my 1920x1440 screen forever? Will persons with laptops at 640x480 be unable to read the web soon? Will standards bodies ever require percentage-of-screen width and height specifiers, or even better, implement table width=30ch to specify sizes in relation to the current font size?

Standards bodies can recommend certain authoring practices, and they can develop standards that make such practices possible, but they cannot enforce good authoring.

11) Evaluate Slashdot
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Pseudonymus Bosch

What would you change, what would you add, what would you remove in Slashdot?

Jeffrey:

It's a community and it works. It has achieved visibility, notoriety, and even commercial success without giving an inch. Pretty awesome achievement. What would I change?

Sometimes the longer threads take a long time to load, due to back-end technology, platform and server issues. The technology works better on Linux than it does on my platform of choice (Mac OS) but, hey, that's okay.

I know you want me to comment on the design. Design is subjective. Black backgrounds and teal are not my favorite color scheme (though I used black backgrounds at the 1995 Ad Graveyard (http://www.zeldman.com/ad.html) and the January 1997 Furbo Filters so who am I to talk? The main thing I was trying to do at Furbo was get CSS to work - and to let people know about Craig Hockenberry's and my Furbo Filters, which were the only Photoshop plugins at the time that dealt with the web-safe color palette - at least to our knowledge.)

I might change the color scheme and some other things if Rob Malda went on a crack run and asked me to redesign Slashdot, but that ain't likely to happen. And I think the design of Slashdot is just fine. It focuses you on the breaking stories, allows you to read more (or not), and provides access to almost everything else on the site via small navigation units. In terms of usability it is damn good, and it has plenty of attitude.

Of course, it commits the "cardinal sin" of teal, but I can get past that.

12) Do you agree with Nielsen?
(Score:4, Interesting)
by Pseudonymus Bosch

I have no idea about you and your views, but I have read lots of the Alertbox columns by Jakob Nielsen.

Do you agree with him? Do you disagree? What about?

Jeffrey:

I agree with his comments on oral sex and wearing white after Labor Day.

And I like that he can get $25,000 to talk for an hour. I'll do the same for half that amount.

I also agree with Jakob that most websites should be usable by as many people as possible.

What I have done about that is help found The Web Standards Project, so we can actually achieve that goal instead of using duct tape and lasagna to build sites that work for "most" people. And I try to make my pages accessible in spite of the limitations of current browsers and some of the cross-platform issues discussed above.

If you are interested in my views, you can read them at http://www.alistapart.com/, Adobe.com (here, http://www.adobe.com/we b/columns/zeldman/20000320/main.html, for instance), http://www.webstandards.org/ and of course at http://www.zeldman.com/. If you can get past the 4k splash page.

At least you share the use of TITLE attributes in hyperlinks (a good feature that Slashdot shouldn't chomp away).

Thanks! The reason Slashdot chomps title tags is probably because they are not supported in Netscape yet. They are an important usability feature, and in some browsers they also offer nifty low-grade special effects - along with the opportunity for contextual ampliciation or ironic commentary.

jeffrey

Can't act. Can't sing. Can dance a little.

http://www.zeldman.com
http://www.alistapart.com
http://www.happycog.com
http://www.webstandards.org

The source code for this news story is the bugzilla report, so read the source if you really want to know what's going on. Mozilla's M15 build has a feature to block webpage images that come from another site: it blocks banner ads. The feature's a little buggy, but it could probably be worked out. Four weeks ago, the feature was removed: "it went the way of management decree" says a Netscape employee. It sounds like AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape didn't want an ad-unfriendly feature in the web browser they're financing. But Mozilla contributors say this has been misinterpreted. What's the real story?

"Please don't jump to conclusions." That's the advice from the developer whose bugzilla postings got people concerned in the first place. OK, so let's take this slow.

Oh, and - this is the second story on Slashdot today that puts generous, overworked open-source contributors under the microscope, and I feel a little bad about that. I hope they understand we're not denigrating their efforts, and that we are grateful for their work.

The feature at issue here lets you block images from a webpage if they come from a foreign site. If you're reading www.slashdot.org, any images from www.foreignsite.net will simply not be loaded. Say, hypothetically, www.doubleclick.net. That would be one example.

Is this the most important feature in the world? Not really. But is it important? Yes. Not just because it blocks most ad banners. It also eliminates what Richard Smith calls web bugs: a technique which can track you across the net without your knowing. The extra privacy is probably a good thing.

(On the bright side, the feature that blocks foreign-site cookies is still in place; this is a very good idea.)

One thing that complicates the issue is that the image-blocking feature was having a few problems. The example given was that, on AltaVista's homepage, the "submit" button graphic comes from a domain owned by the same parent company - but because the domain name is different, the button does not appear. There was concern that users might not understand this. A proposed alternative was to add a dialog warning of such unexpected behavior, and/or to give users more options for how graphics would be blocked.

My thinking is that the problems could have been solved. The person in charge of UI design issues suggested a design workaround that probably would have made the feature quite usable.

I should point out that just because this bug has been marked as WONTFIX, that doesn't mean it won't be reopened; this has happened thousands of times. Actually, now the bug has been marked INVALID, indicating the removal of the feature from the menu is not considered a bug but ... a feature. Well, OK, so its removal was intentional; will the feature be re-added later? Possibly.

But why was this feature removed? In mid-April, shortly after it had disappeared from the current build, one volunteer spoke to a Netscape employee and summarized events as "management had told them to strip the feature."

This sounded uncomfortably like AOL influencing the browser design to suit their needs. I suspect that the Time-Warner media empire might take in a few dollars from banner ads. I suspect they might not like giving users a way to block almost all banner ads with just a few clicks. They don't mind a small percentage of us using a squid proxy, Junkbusters, or creative /etc/hostsing. But to turn that power over to everyone would seriously threaten their revenue stream.

As one might expect, the preview release of Netscape6, the "AOL version" of the browser that was spun off of the Mozilla project, has a preferences dialog that looks a lot like Mozilla's except when it comes to this feature. The foreign-cookie blocker is in place; the foreign-image blocker is not. (But they spun it off an earlier release - maybe the feature wasn't written then; I don't know.)

One of the volunteer developers, at least, has been loudly protesting the implication that anything is wrong. On kuro5hin.org, they are free to state their case and there's some good discussion. And this morning, the same volunteer who originally logged the "went the way of management decree" message appended another log entry, worth reading in full:

"This has gotten a little out of control. The only thing Steve Morse informed me was that as of now, the image blocking prefs have been *publicly* removed from the build. This means that though you CAN still retrieve the feature if you so desire, the menu options and interface are not -- by default -- accessible. This is done often for testing purposes; if something you're working on seems to be conflicting with the image blocking module, you can simply opt to turn it off to complete your work. Who the heck said anything about it being removed permanently? Admittedly, my note wasn't clear, but I think blaming AOL for the supposed 'removal' of this feature is absurd and a little conspiracist, don't you think? To the news sites carrying this: I'm sorry, but what we have here is a nonissue. [...]

"To clarify: the ONLY piece of information Steve gave me was that the feature, as of now, did not appear to be in the latest builds, but really was. His words that the feature 'went the way of management' decree simply refer to the fact that 'management' (NOT AOL management or even AOL-related, mind you) told him to turn the image blocking preference off by default in the latest nightly builds (probably so some technical issues that the feature's causing can be ironed out). That's it - I apologize for the ambiguity of my original words, but they never meant to imply the removal of this feature. Nor did Steve's."

I'm a little skeptical of what would be accomplished by removing this feature from the menu and dialog, but then I'm not the one who's working on the source, am I?

I'm less skeptical about all this now than I was this morning. Part of what worried me was this same volunteer's earlier comment on kuro5hin.org:

"...there's still quite a easy way to get the image blocking preferences back (IMHO, I believe they were removed in the first place because it is ads that heavily supports Netcenter), by adding a certain line in your prefs.js file."

But in email today, he said that this was just a guess and he no longer believes it's true. Fair enough.

Getting any developers to talk about this bug has been like pulling teeth. Only one of the developers I contacted (repeatedly) even bothered to return my email.

What's important to understand is that having to restore the preferences by editing a Javascript preferences text file isn't the same as having it in the right-click menu. If people could block ads with a right-click and just a little poking around, the nature of the web would change drastically.

Finally, here's the same volunteer, again on kuro5hin.org:

"This has been blown way out of proportion.

"I am now hearing from other NSCP employees that this feature has only been taken out temporarily due to complications with the PSM module.

"Furthermore, can you all _please_ stop assuming things from Steve's statement? Steve said it went the way of management decree. This means whatever happened to the image prefs, it came by way of a couple people labeled 'management' (not AOL management, nor AOL-related in any way, mind you). _I_ was the one who suggested the feature was stripped. In reality, this feature may be being improved on, may have been removed temporarily (this happens often to many commonly used features in testing), or a number of other things that would explain its current disappearance.

"Please don't jump to conclusions."

OK. And those are nice hypotheticals for what could be something perfectly ordinary. If the explanation is that simple, though, I wish that someone else had just answered my email to say so.

The nice thing about an open-source web browser is that, even if M16 comes out with a NoPrivacy(tm) feature that uploads everything you do directly to whitehouse.gov, we're all free to fork our own project with the M15 source. We can include this feature or any other.

Conversely, Mozilla is not Netscape 6; AOL is free to add or remove whatever features they like when they release 6.0.1.

But, the official release of Mozilla will be widely distributed. I hope its functionality will be all it could be. If you want the Mozilla development team to make this feature work, and keep it in the next builds, post a comment below to let them know it's important to you. And be nice. They work hard.

The source code for this news story is the bugzilla report, so read the source if you really want to know what's going on. Mozilla's M15 build has a feature to block webpage images that come from another site: it blocks banner ads. The feature's a little buggy, but it could probably be worked out. Four weeks ago, the feature was removed: "it went the way of management decree" says a Netscape employee. It sounds like AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape didn't want an ad-unfriendly feature in the web browser they're financing. But Mozilla contributors say this has been misinterpreted. What's the real story?

"Please don't jump to conclusions." That's the advice from the developer whose bugzilla postings got people concerned in the first place. OK, so let's take this slow.

Oh, and - this is the second story on Slashdot today that puts generous, overworked open-source contributors under the microscope, and I feel a little bad about that. I hope they understand we're not denigrating their efforts, and that we are grateful for their work.

The feature at issue here lets you block images from a webpage if they come from a foreign site. If you're reading www.slashdot.org, any images from www.foreignsite.net will simply not be loaded. Say, hypothetically, www.doubleclick.net. That would be one example.

Is this the most important feature in the world? Not really. But is it important? Yes. Not just because it blocks most ad banners. It also eliminates what Richard Smith calls web bugs: a technique which can track you across the net without your knowing. The extra privacy is probably a good thing.

(On the bright side, the feature that blocks foreign-site cookies is still in place; this is a very good idea.)

One thing that complicates the issue is that the image-blocking feature was having a few problems. The example given was that, on AltaVista's homepage, the "submit" button graphic comes from a domain owned by the same parent company - but because the domain name is different, the button does not appear. There was concern that users might not understand this. A proposed alternative was to add a dialog warning of such unexpected behavior, and/or to give users more options for how graphics would be blocked.

My thinking is that the problems could have been solved. The person in charge of UI design issues suggested a design workaround that probably would have made the feature quite usable.

I should point out that just because this bug has been marked as WONTFIX, that doesn't mean it won't be reopened; this has happened thousands of times. Actually, now the bug has been marked INVALID, indicating the removal of the feature from the menu is not considered a bug but ... a feature. Well, OK, so its removal was intentional; will the feature be re-added later? Possibly.

But why was this feature removed? In mid-April, shortly after it had disappeared from the current build, one volunteer spoke to a Netscape employee and summarized events as "management had told them to strip the feature."

This sounded uncomfortably like AOL influencing the browser design to suit their needs. I suspect that the Time-Warner media empire might take in a few dollars from banner ads. I suspect they might not like giving users a way to block almost all banner ads with just a few clicks. They don't mind a small percentage of us using a squid proxy, Junkbusters, or creative /etc/hostsing. But to turn that power over to everyone would seriously threaten their revenue stream.

As one might expect, the preview release of Netscape6, the "AOL version" of the browser that was spun off of the Mozilla project, has a preferences dialog that looks a lot like Mozilla's except when it comes to this feature. The foreign-cookie blocker is in place; the foreign-image blocker is not. (But they spun it off an earlier release - maybe the feature wasn't written then; I don't know.)

One of the volunteer developers, at least, has been loudly protesting the implication that anything is wrong. On kuro5hin.org, they are free to state their case and there's some good discussion. And this morning, the same volunteer who originally logged the "went the way of management decree" message appended another log entry, worth reading in full:

"This has gotten a little out of control. The only thing Steve Morse informed me was that as of now, the image blocking prefs have been *publicly* removed from the build. This means that though you CAN still retrieve the feature if you so desire, the menu options and interface are not -- by default -- accessible. This is done often for testing purposes; if something you're working on seems to be conflicting with the image blocking module, you can simply opt to turn it off to complete your work. Who the heck said anything about it being removed permanently? Admittedly, my note wasn't clear, but I think blaming AOL for the supposed 'removal' of this feature is absurd and a little conspiracist, don't you think? To the news sites carrying this: I'm sorry, but what we have here is a nonissue. [...]

"To clarify: the ONLY piece of information Steve gave me was that the feature, as of now, did not appear to be in the latest builds, but really was. His words that the feature 'went the way of management' decree simply refer to the fact that 'management' (NOT AOL management or even AOL-related, mind you) told him to turn the image blocking preference off by default in the latest nightly builds (probably so some technical issues that the feature's causing can be ironed out). That's it - I apologize for the ambiguity of my original words, but they never meant to imply the removal of this feature. Nor did Steve's."

I'm a little skeptical of what would be accomplished by removing this feature from the menu and dialog, but then I'm not the one who's working on the source, am I?

I'm less skeptical about all this now than I was this morning. Part of what worried me was this same volunteer's earlier comment on kuro5hin.org:

"...there's still quite a easy way to get the image blocking preferences back (IMHO, I believe they were removed in the first place because it is ads that heavily supports Netcenter), by adding a certain line in your prefs.js file."

But in email today, he said that this was just a guess and he no longer believes it's true. Fair enough.

Getting any developers to talk about this bug has been like pulling teeth. Only one of the developers I contacted (repeatedly) even bothered to return my email.

What's important to understand is that having to restore the preferences by editing a Javascript preferences text file isn't the same as having it in the right-click menu. If people could block ads with a right-click and just a little poking around, the nature of the web would change drastically.

Finally, here's the same volunteer, again on kuro5hin.org:

"This has been blown way out of proportion.

"I am now hearing from other NSCP employees that this feature has only been taken out temporarily due to complications with the PSM module.

"Furthermore, can you all _please_ stop assuming things from Steve's statement? Steve said it went the way of management decree. This means whatever happened to the image prefs, it came by way of a couple people labeled 'management' (not AOL management, nor AOL-related in any way, mind you). _I_ was the one who suggested the feature was stripped. In reality, this feature may be being improved on, may have been removed temporarily (this happens often to many commonly used features in testing), or a number of other things that would explain its current disappearance.

"Please don't jump to conclusions."

OK. And those are nice hypotheticals for what could be something perfectly ordinary. If the explanation is that simple, though, I wish that someone else had just answered my email to say so.

The nice thing about an open-source web browser is that, even if M16 comes out with a NoPrivacy(tm) feature that uploads everything you do directly to whitehouse.gov, we're all free to fork our own project with the M15 source. We can include this feature or any other.

Conversely, Mozilla is not Netscape 6; AOL is free to add or remove whatever features they like when they release 6.0.1.

But, the official release of Mozilla will be widely distributed. I hope its functionality will be all it could be. If you want the Mozilla development team to make this feature work, and keep it in the next builds, post a comment below to let them know it's important to you. And be nice. They work hard.

The source code for this news story is the bugzilla report, so read the source if you really want to know what's going on. Mozilla's M15 build has a feature to block webpage images that come from another site: it blocks banner ads. The feature's a little buggy, but it could probably be worked out. Four weeks ago, the feature was removed: "it went the way of management decree" says a Netscape employee. It sounds like AOL-Time-Warner-Netscape didn't want an ad-unfriendly feature in the web browser they're financing. But Mozilla contributors say this has been misinterpreted. What's the real story?

"Please don't jump to conclusions." That's the advice from the developer whose bugzilla postings got people concerned in the first place. OK, so let's take this slow.

Oh, and - this is the second story on Slashdot today that puts generous, overworked open-source contributors under the microscope, and I feel a little bad about that. I hope they understand we're not denigrating their efforts, and that we are grateful for their work.

The feature at issue here lets you block images from a webpage if they come from a foreign site. If you're reading www.slashdot.org, any images from www.foreignsite.net will simply not be loaded. Say, hypothetically, www.doubleclick.net. That would be one example.

Is this the most important feature in the world? Not really. But is it important? Yes. Not just because it blocks most ad banners. It also eliminates what Richard Smith calls web bugs: a technique which can track you across the net without your knowing. The extra privacy is probably a good thing.

(On the bright side, the feature that blocks foreign-site cookies is still in place; this is a very good idea.)

One thing that complicates the issue is that the image-blocking feature was having a few problems. The example given was that, on AltaVista's homepage, the "submit" button graphic comes from a domain owned by the same parent company - but because the domain name is different, the button does not appear. There was concern that users might not understand this. A proposed alternative was to add a dialog warning of such unexpected behavior, and/or to give users more options for how graphics would be blocked.

My thinking is that the problems could have been solved. The person in charge of UI design issues suggested a design workaround that probably would have made the feature quite usable.

I should point out that just because this bug has been marked as WONTFIX, that doesn't mean it won't be reopened; this has happened thousands of times. Actually, now the bug has been marked INVALID, indicating the removal of the feature from the menu is not considered a bug but ... a feature. Well, OK, so its removal was intentional; will the feature be re-added later? Possibly.

But why was this feature removed? In mid-April, shortly after it had disappeared from the current build, one volunteer spoke to a Netscape employee and summarized events as "management had told them to strip the feature."

This sounded uncomfortably like AOL influencing the browser design to suit their needs. I suspect that the Time-Warner media empire might take in a few dollars from banner ads. I suspect they might not like giving users a way to block almost all banner ads with just a few clicks. They don't mind a small percentage of us using a squid proxy, Junkbusters, or creative /etc/hostsing. But to turn that power over to everyone would seriously threaten their revenue stream.

As one might expect, the preview release of Netscape6, the "AOL version" of the browser that was spun off of the Mozilla project, has a preferences dialog that looks a lot like Mozilla's except when it comes to this feature. The foreign-cookie blocker is in place; the foreign-image blocker is not. (But they spun it off an earlier release - maybe the feature wasn't written then; I don't know.)

One of the volunteer developers, at least, has been loudly protesting the implication that anything is wrong. On kuro5hin.org, they are free to state their case and there's some good discussion. And this morning, the same volunteer who originally logged the "went the way of management decree" message appended another log entry, worth reading in full:

"This has gotten a little out of control. The only thing Steve Morse informed me was that as of now, the image blocking prefs have been *publicly* removed from the build. This means that though you CAN still retrieve the feature if you so desire, the menu options and interface are not -- by default -- accessible. This is done often for testing purposes; if something you're working on seems to be conflicting with the image blocking module, you can simply opt to turn it off to complete your work. Who the heck said anything about it being removed permanently? Admittedly, my note wasn't clear, but I think blaming AOL for the supposed 'removal' of this feature is absurd and a little conspiracist, don't you think? To the news sites carrying this: I'm sorry, but what we have here is a nonissue. [...]

"To clarify: the ONLY piece of information Steve gave me was that the feature, as of now, did not appear to be in the latest builds, but really was. His words that the feature 'went the way of management' decree simply refer to the fact that 'management' (NOT AOL management or even AOL-related, mind you) told him to turn the image blocking preference off by default in the latest nightly builds (probably so some technical issues that the feature's causing can be ironed out). That's it - I apologize for the ambiguity of my original words, but they never meant to imply the removal of this feature. Nor did Steve's."

I'm a little skeptical of what would be accomplished by removing this feature from the menu and dialog, but then I'm not the one who's working on the source, am I?

I'm less skeptical about all this now than I was this morning. Part of what worried me was this same volunteer's earlier comment on kuro5hin.org:

"...there's still quite a easy way to get the image blocking preferences back (IMHO, I believe they were removed in the first place because it is ads that heavily supports Netcenter), by adding a certain line in your prefs.js file."

But in email today, he said that this was just a guess and he no longer believes it's true. Fair enough.

Getting any developers to talk about this bug has been like pulling teeth. Only one of the developers I contacted (repeatedly) even bothered to return my email.

What's important to understand is that having to restore the preferences by editing a Javascript preferences text file isn't the same as having it in the right-click menu. If people could block ads with a right-click and just a little poking around, the nature of the web would change drastically.

Finally, here's the same volunteer, again on kuro5hin.org:

"This has been blown way out of proportion.

"I am now hearing from other NSCP employees that this feature has only been taken out temporarily due to complications with the PSM module.

"Furthermore, can you all _please_ stop assuming things from Steve's statement? Steve said it went the way of management decree. This means whatever happened to the image prefs, it came by way of a couple people labeled 'management' (not AOL management, nor AOL-related in any way, mind you). _I_ was the one who suggested the feature was stripped. In reality, this feature may be being improved on, may have been removed temporarily (this happens often to many commonly used features in testing), or a number of other things that would explain its current disappearance.

"Please don't jump to conclusions."

OK. And those are nice hypotheticals for what could be something perfectly ordinary. If the explanation is that simple, though, I wish that someone else had just answered my email to say so.

The nice thing about an open-source web browser is that, even if M16 comes out with a NoPrivacy(tm) feature that uploads everything you do directly to whitehouse.gov, we're all free to fork our own project with the M15 source. We can include this feature or any other.

Conversely, Mozilla is not Netscape 6; AOL is free to add or remove whatever features they like when they release 6.0.1.

But, the official release of Mozilla will be widely distributed. I hope its functionality will be all it could be. If you want the Mozilla development team to make this feature work, and keep it in the next builds, post a comment below to let them know it's important to you. And be nice. They work hard.

Will in Seattle writes "cNet has a story on RealNetworks using code from Mozilla.org's open-source browser code in a private-label version of its media player and server for Web broadcaster Global Media. This version lets RealNetworks' system stream and display Web elements including HTML and Macromedia Flash animation files, and you can download their mods here. "

Their GIF patent expires in 2003, so Unisys is getting while the getting's good, according to CNET. They're not commenting on the record, but it seems they'll be kicking up their licensing fees. According to one source, they asked Accuweather for US$3.8million. Instead, AccuWeather forecasts switching to PNG next month (insert sound effect of burning GIFs.)

Update: 04/19 09:44 by J : I just checked the bug log for Mozilla's lack of PNG alpha transparency (which has been registered and debated for over a year, and which I gather is the major factor standing between Mozilla and PNG compliance).

Three days ago, after a little tweaking, Greg Roelofs reported significant progress on the latest build:

http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/pngs-img-moz.html

It's gorgeous! Aside from the interlacing bug (bug 3195), it's the equal of MacIE 5.0. Well done, Tim and Pam! It's truly a lovely thing to behold. I look forward to seeing this bug closed out at last.

[TWD]insomnia writes "Mozilla M15 is out on their FTP site. It seems already a bit faster than M14 and Netscape 6 PR1. " Not in woody yet (blatant hint ;)

[TWD]insomnia writes "Mozilla M15 is out on their FTP site. It seems already a bit faster than M14 and Netscape 6 PR1. " Not in woody yet (blatant hint ;)

Deven writes "Happy birthday, Mozilla! The Lizard is two years old today. We may not be there quite yet, but Mozilla has come a long way since March 31, 1998... " Hmmm...Marilyn Manson and Mozilla - that'd be a great birthday shot.

No cookies with offsite GIFs: that's the privacy solution implemented by IDcide (take a moment to register the pun, OK, there ya go). Here's technical background on offsite cookies; here's the CNNstory; here's the software FAQ (it's only available for Windows/MSIE). If you're not sure why offsite cookies matter, you must read this. And, not to rain on IDcide's revenue model -- their product does other stuff too -- but why isn't offsite cookie rejection built into all browsers? Anyone from Mozilla want to talk about this?

liber wrote to us with the press release on Yahoo! regarding the upcoming release of Netscape 6, aka Mozilla. It's a beta, not a full release, but the piece does a good job of talking about consumer anticipation, as well as the big companies that are behind it. Don't wait until the crowd hits. Get started now.

physicman writes "I just read on MozillaZine that there is finally a release containing the new crypto code. This means we will eventually get the chance to get access to secure Websites with our favorite nearly-in-beta-stage browser. " Mozilla's really been making a lot of progress recently -- and it looks great.

Anderson Silva (among others) zapped us the news that you can now grab Mozilla's M14 release (Seamonkey). The Mozilla Organization's site doesn't yet reflect M14's availability, but it will soon. For now, here are the release notes. So grab, test, and gripe -- bug reports will only make the Mozilla browser better.

Anderson Silva (among others) zapped us the news that you can now grab Mozilla's M14 release (Seamonkey). The Mozilla Organization's site doesn't yet reflect M14's availability, but it will soon. For now, here are the release notes. So grab, test, and gripe -- bug reports will only make the Mozilla browser better.

Anderson Silva (among others) zapped us the news that you can now grab Mozilla's M14 release (Seamonkey). The Mozilla Organization's site doesn't yet reflect M14's availability, but it will soon. For now, here are the release notes. So grab, test, and gripe -- bug reports will only make the Mozilla browser better.

Anderson Silva (among others) zapped us the news that you can now grab Mozilla's M14 release (Seamonkey). The Mozilla Organization's site doesn't yet reflect M14's availability, but it will soon. For now, here are the release notes. So grab, test, and gripe -- bug reports will only make the Mozilla browser better.

Willy Wonka passed us the news that Mozilla's M14 release will include crypotography on the branch. If you'd care to add your eyeballs to the debugging process, please do: Christine Begle posts in the n.p.m.seamonkey newsgroup, "We need help from the Mozilla community to test the crypto-enabled M14 candidate builds. Some tests and test plans will be posted to mozilla.org sometime on Tuesday." That's today, folks.

friedo asks: "Projects such as Mozilla have developed sophisticated tools like Bugzilla, an automated build status page and a ridiculously cool hyperlinked, cross referenced source viewer. Would other open source developments such as the Kernel, Gnome, etc. benefit from the use of similar tools? Should we develop more organization and automation to help further open source projects?" Good thought, but such things are up to the individual projects. However, this might be a better idea for newer Open Source projects than ones that are already well established.

friedo asks: "Projects such as Mozilla have developed sophisticated tools like Bugzilla, an automated build status page and a ridiculously cool hyperlinked, cross referenced source viewer. Would other open source developments such as the Kernel, Gnome, etc. benefit from the use of similar tools? Should we develop more organization and automation to help further open source projects?" Good thought, but such things are up to the individual projects. However, this might be a better idea for newer Open Source projects than ones that are already well established.