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Mozilla Adds MNG Support
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!"
Yeah, they should remove the -tag too, in case someone would link to a possibly annoying page?
;)
Yes, the line below is my signature
Yes, PNG is good.
But yopu can count the number of sites that actually use it on one hand, can't you?
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Oh my god, Bear is driving! How can this be?
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
You can post PNG feature lists until the cows come home, but it still remains that the PNG format hasn't been a success. You're not gonna find many sites that are as anti-"The Man" and would be the type of site to promote PNGs as Slashdot, yet even they're still using GIFs. It's hard to convince everyone else when the open source crowd won't eat its own dog food. Note that I prefer PNGs myself, but the evidence is pretty clear so far as to its lack of adoption.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
pretending?
if he posts for karma then he's a karma whore.
what he wants to do with that karma is not the issue.
How many people has Unisys sued for using Gif's on their websites? I have used gifs for years on my site and I haven't heard a word from their lawyers. Now if I developed commercial software that depends on the Gif format, then I'd expect Unisys to want a piece of the action. Unisys made a big PR blunder, they have backed off and clarified their position. Relax and enjoy your animated Gif's. I do love using the transparent Gif and will continue using them. PNG is cool too.
photosMy Photostream
If you're using Windows, MSIE has an option to disable animations. I haven't tried it though.
Tools->Internet Options->Advanced->Multimedia->Play Animations
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
She's threatened other people with lawsuits, and hasn't been able to follow through because not only does she not have a leg to stand on, but the music she uses belongs to Disney, so she's violating a much more strongly-defended copyright.
I highly recommend the above link, BTW. Kill them hamsters.
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Netscape products have always offered hitting 'STOP' twice after the page loads (since 4.x?) to stop Animated gifs ...
... I like a lot of the animated GIFs out there ... the nice clean ones that look like well-done marketing logos.
... PS, yes
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
There are 3 animated gifs in the Mozilla chrome. The throbber, the progress meter, and loading for the sidebar.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
Zico, you're a fucking moron. You're the anti-Signal 11, equal in value but opposite in ideology, posting gibberish that caters to moderators who think blind cynicism is somehow profound.
The fact is, it made sense to use Jpeg at the time (there were few if any decent, widespread alternatives that had similar "compressability") and CompuServe (which, for all of you net.neophytes was a huge ISP back in the day) threw its weight behind GIF. Sure, better formats have popped up since, but who uses 'em? I don't, /. certainly doesn't, neither does Yahoo!.
The fact is, if you want to know when an image format is finally on the verge of gaining acceptance, check out the porn world... Porn sites can also tell you when efficient movie formats are mainstream "enough." Virtually the intire PC industry is goverened by either games or porn... It's no surprise that it's dominated by men.Mark Prindle, the most underappreciated genius on the web.
If you are thinking about killing animation check out bug 21623.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
Here ya go: http://www.hampsterdance2.com/hamp sterdance.html. :-)
As I recall, they also wanted a piece if you're making commercial content with non-commercial software, or commercial software which somehow got released without a Unisys license.
True. Remember how long it took to get JPEG accepted everywhere? I still have a couple shareware "jpeg-viewer" apps floating around here somewhere....
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Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Animations are amazingly annoying, and I hope there will be a preference item to disable them.
Compressing tiffs using lzw is optional, btw.
So are you trying to say that the PNG format has been a success so far? Nope, I guess even you're not that foolish, so you'd rather just get your panties in a bunch and rant against anybody who states the cold, disappointing truth. Wheeeee :)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Serious work on MNG started in 1996, and, IINM, it reached a 1.0 status some time last year. Seriously, though, I can't see why people wouldn't use MNG. The idea behind it is completely useless, so if some users can't view it properly, you're really doing them a favour.
Ironic that this story was posted right after one about China cracking down and jailing people who dare try to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre.
C'mon Mozilla, please lose the red star logo already.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Yes, that was kind of neat. Mind you, when the file refuses to load anyway (assuming you're using a decent viewer) or contains incomprehensible garbage, that might be a clue that "hey, something's wrong". To be fair, though, "you may have transferred this file in ASCII mode" is a nicer error message than "could not load image".
Given that Slashdot and a million other websites continue to use GIF *how many* ? years after PNG, I think MNG will take just as long to gain acceptance.
I think that after Mozilla comes out of beta, then sites will start moving to PNG quickly. As a web developer I still see a fair percentage of visitors with Netscape less than 4.5, which doesn't support PNG (*so far as I know... let me know if I'm wrong*)
We'll see a large-scale displacement of GIFs on my sites within a year, once the percentage of PNG incapable browsers on our sites drops below 10%. Don't hate me, but I subscribe to the theory that if you are a holdout against new technology you gotta roll with the punches and accept it (of course, text alternative menus are a must). MNG will be the same, if it's as good as they say. Like any new technology, if Microsoft and AOL/Netscape support it "out of the box" I'll be moving over again.
-rt-
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
...like supporting JNG encoding (JPEG done PNG style), which I'm sure people will love for porn banner ads.
I thought the same thing, though. I actually went so far as to design my own spec, which I called IMAG8 (Interim Minimal Animated Graphic - 8-bit; basically, a pixel dump of the sprites, and a list of simple frame compositions, all zlib compressed). I believe that the GIF licence will run out before MNG gets widespread support (because it's so complicated), but I thought if I designed a sufficiently simple format, it could replace GIF overnight for many uses (such as banner ads in custom programs used for one specific service, like specialized versions of ICQ).
I dropped the idea before I released it, though. It worked out okay technically (only a few hundred lines of code for the viewer; it's not that hard when you stick to the rule "implement, then document"), but I decided that I didn't really want to support the use of animated banner ads.
When you get right down to it, I don't think there's a valid use for that kind of functionality. It's just another way to grab the user's attention to something he'd rather ignore. It ought to be turned off by default in all web browsers.
They both suck but i use PNG cause of good compression.
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Is your sig file boring?
But IE has no option to stop those darn Java ads, and I think 'Punch the Monkey' is one of them!
#$@$#%$#@!!
You big loser! USE GIMP. It gots a bueatiful
interface and its very customizable. Why use
Photocrap when all it can do is Open, Add Crap,
Save, and Print. Gheeshe... Why are
there so many stupid people in the world that use
those expensive, crappy, MS products?
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Is your sig file boring?
Your argument would be a whole lot stronger if you could come up with a few examples where animated images are part of the content.
I can't think of any off-hand.
But [you] can count the number of sites that actually use [PNG images] on one hand, can't you?
For a set to be counted on one standard human hand, there must be thirty-one or fewer elements (all five fingers up = binary 11111 = 31). Here's a short list; can you think of more?
- Pinocchio's Brother and redpinocchio (my homepage)
- Every other site I've designed (can't name them; confidentiality)
- PNG headquarters
- League for Programming Freedom
- Burn All GIFs Day
- Campaign for Real Ale
- AuctionBeagle
- University of Puerto Ricto Institute of Neurobiology
- Eressea Fantasy PBEM
- several clip art sites (here or here)
To find more, do a web search for burn all gifs.Will I retire or break 10K?
The problem with the STOP button in Navigator is that they've slipped a SHOP button in right beside it. Generally I only use the STOP button in emergency situations, i.e. I accidently click on a link, on a page that took forever to load, and don't want to go through loading it again to undo my mistake. (i.e. slow loading dynamic pages). So I hit the SHOP button by mistake (I of course have the graphics turned off on the buttons), and whoosh. It sucks. It sucks a LOT.
Why not just set up your site to send PNGs and MNGs to browsers that support them, and GIFs to other browsers?
www.britz.com - somehow down atm - uses animated gifs in its online booking system tutorial to show requirements and so on.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
Clue: read a magazine. I see no JPGs and GIFs.
Yes. I know you're a troll.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
I do love using the transparent Gif and will continue using them. PNG is cool too.
PNG supports both GIF-style binary and alpha-blended transparency. If you care about browser support, IE 4.02 and later support binary transparency in indexed images, and Mozilla supports full alpha transparency (falling back to dithered alpha on platforms such as X without alpha channels).
Will I retire or break 10K?
And yet this is not a troll/flame. *sigh*
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that our friend sourceforge uses only PNG images.
Despite all PNG's claims, though, Photoshop 5.5 still does a better job of compressing GIFs. =( Needless to say their GIF export code is more mature (they even have a "lossy" compression mode), but that was a disappointment.
Patent concerns aside, the sooner that I get to stop hearing people pronounce it "jif" (and cringing because I know that's right), the better! Down with GIF!
After reading through this whole list of discusion there were only a handful of people who sounded like they even had any idea what they were talking about. That is my only guess as to why this topic was so spammed.
Okay so MNG isn't widely supported yet, that problem is fixed one application at a time isn't it? I've actually been using it for quite some time and think highly of the format.
PNG isn't widely supported yet? Not as widely supported as GIF or JPEG but I'm seeing it more and more often. Maybe it is more popular among the geek crowd than among graphic artist but it's starting to spread across the web and is supported in most graphic manipulation and viewing programs I've seen.
Internet Explorer, Photoshop, whatever can't use it.. I refer you back to answer #1. Support comes one app at a time. If you want your favorite app to support it too then tell them so.
Mozilla should be working on other things? Mozilla is an open project and people can contribute whatever they are interested in to the cause. MNG is a highly requested feature. If you want something else worked on then either do it yourself or fund someone else to do it.
PNG/MNG aren't good enough? Again if you don't like the way things are then improve upon it, fund someone else to improve upon it, or convince the patent holder of your favorite standard to make it free. Or just go on paying stupid fees if you want.
Mozilla has a dumb logo? What the shit does that have to do with MNG in Mozilla? Make a skin for it that has whatever logo you like.
Your favorite porn site doesn't use PNG/MNG so it must not be a real image format? Maybe they're to busy masturbating over their own models to think about saving their images in a better format. Get a life and get laid and stop wanking to porn sites.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
More support than GIMP is needed I am afraid
Well it is supported by Paint Shop Pro, which is really the graphic editor of most people who do web pages and can't afford Photoshop (or don't want to bother with the complexity of it). So it is already well supported on the creation side... now what is needed is support in IE. No support in IE = death.
Here are some animated Sokoban solutions. Sokoban is a puzzle game where you have to push blocks around a maze.
Everything in this post is false.
PNG is not a huge success because browser support for the format has been so shit. Hopefully, Mozilla and future versions of IE will put that right.
Lad, you seem to be missing the point here. Do you think that widespread adoption is neccessary for success? It isn't. Most computer users don't know FreeBSD from a bar of soap, yet it plays a vital role in the Internet's running.
The point is, that while PNG might not have gained the widespread use of GIF, it certainly is a better format, as the feature lists demonstrate. Unless, for some reason, you think that Windows 95 and MS DOS are the best operating systems around, since they were the highest volume selling operating systems? That would be nonsense, of course. In the Bioinformatics arena, Windows 95 and MS DOS are not the optimal OS choices, therefore, in the Bioinformatics arena, Windows 95 and MS DOS were pretty much failures - not sucesses. Please stop posting nonsense, lad."A few atoms won't even light a match" - Dr Jones, 1933
Sure, all that's needed for it to take off is support in Mozilla and the GIMP! Then it'll be the huge success that PNG has been.... right?
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
I hoped Unisys' plot to destroy banner ads was going to work...;( K
This may be useful in a niche way, but I don't see it really making inroads on the big boys. Jpeg, jpeg2000, and flash/shockwave are going to be all the multimedia necessary for websites in the present and in the foreseable future. Animated gifs are soo old school that they are almost embarassing, typically are vastly overused and tend to detract from the aesthetics and usability of a site. I have seen very few sites that use animated gifs in a useful or even artistic / cool way, whereas I have seen many that use flash and javascript and standard html in very cool ways that enhance usability (though, of course, the use of flash and other elements of "chrome" does not necessarily make a site better).
I know you're all dying to read it...
http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/ spec/draft-mng-lc.html
is it just me, or is it a LOT easier to program a GIF decoder heh.... ah well, the advance of modern technology blah blah.
--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
Who cares about stupid MNG format! Just use gifs and nobody will have the right to charge you 5000 bucks for a little transparent animated image! What are you people scared of?
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Is your sig file boring?
I can have my totally free, politically correct dancing hamsters.
is MNG supported by IE? By a lot of graphics devel programs? The fact that it's in Mozilla is great, but if it's going to catch on, it needs something more used to support it. I don't know anything about MNG, but from what the original poster says, it sounds like it's a very new format...well, new formats need visible applications to support them before they take off. Hopefully we'll see that with MNG.
One Microsoft Way
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
The official MNG page is here, and this is a list of applications which do support MNG. As the article mentions, the GIMP is notable by its absence.
This contains some interesting info on the MNG format, and this shows how MNG compares to other image formats.
In your email address, you say "THISWORDOPTIONAL", but which word are you talking about?
One Microsoft Way
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
here, have some Karma
slut
Because the embedded objects making up a MNG are normally in PNG format, MNG shares the good features of PNG:
In addition:
___
Post a list of links
Hoping for moderation
Just a gigolo
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Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
Since when is Photoshop a MS product? There's a reason it's called Adobe Photoshop.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
Wowee! I really wanted to know that. Thanks for posting!
I luv my hoes!
Of course, the signature is there so the decoder can tell that the file is corrupted before it loads the rest of the image. That way, it can abort and not waste bandwidth downloading, or cycles displaying, an image that is obviously screwed up.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
The bugzilla report is here.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
You see, a decent viewer can somethings actually correct this type of problem automatically. Considering the ammount of structure in image files, it's actually quite easy to build a reconstructor that will make the image passible.
No real designers use gimp man, give it up. And if you think gimp has a kick ass UI, you have larger problems eh.
and about Flash - SVG looks far more promising (already)- and it's an XML subtype.
You can't base what's coming on what has come before - not in on the web, anyway.
[ insert meme here ]
NS 4.x: View->Stop Animations will (logically) stop animations on the current page. The closest thing you get to a keyboard shortcut is Alt+V->A.
-- LoonXTall
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
I find it easier to slap Esc than move the mouse. Unless you have a stupid Gateway keyboard with F11 in the corner.
-- LoonXTall
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
This will kill one of my excuses why I haven't fixed bug 8415. If somebody fixes bug 19283 I'm in trouble ;-)
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
Under linux you can press ESC to stop animations on the current page.
I don't think that even qualified as a flame. Any moron knows Photoshop isn't a Microsoft product.
'Sides, perhaps no one with moderator points has read this far down?
Mozilla is Green!
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
You can disable the shop button by using X properties
e x.html,new-window)'
#!/bin/sh
MOZILLA_HOME=/opt/Netscape4.73
export MOZILLA_HOME
JAVA_HOME=$MOZILLA_HOME/java; export JAVA_HOME
NPX_PLUGIN_PATH=$MOZILLA_HOME/plugins; export NPX_PLUGIN_PATH
xrdb -merge <<EOF
!# netscape 4.7 hacks
Netscape4*toolBar.myshopping.isEnabled: false
Netscape4*toolBar.search.isEnabled: false
Netscape4*toolBar.destinations.isEnabled: false
Netscape4*XmTextField.background: #ffffff
EOF
#limit ram usage to 60mb
ulimit -m 60000
if [ -L "$HOME/.netscape/lock" ];
then
$MOZILLA_HOME/netscape \
-remote 'openURL(file:/home/matt/public_html/searcher/ind
if [ $? -ne 0 ];
then
$MOZILLA_HOME/netscape -name Netscape4
fi
else
$MOZILLA_HOME/netscape -name Netscape4
fi
what I'm saying is that you are an anti-establishment fanboy.
But you guys have been telling me all this time that there is no Slashdot GroupThink. But now you're saying that Slashdot is nothing but another bullshit establishment?
Thanks man, that truly was the post of the year around here. :)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com, the anti-establishment rebel-type dude, yeehaw!
I guess I have to admit that every now and then I run across an animated GIF that is actually interesting or amusing...
:-)
But as a general rule, I find animated images to be annoying and repulsive. They tend to be distracting, and draw my attention away from the real reason I have the web page on my screen - the content.
Every day, I wish that my browser had an option to disable animated images. Perhaps there could be a menu icon I could click to enable them on the rare occasion that I really wanted to see the other frames. Now THAT feature would be a major plus to Mozilla. Chances are, I will some day go into the code and add it myself (THANK YOU, MOZILLA for the source code
Honestly, how many of you really enjoy those crappy, animated banner ads on your screen? Is this going to be an *improvement* for Mozilla?
A dingo ate my sig...
Yes, and writing a haiku (something that is NEVER funny) for the point of getting moderation points. Somewhat hypocritical, don't you think?
FUCK YOU ALL
that wasn't a troll, I was genuinely pissed off at that karma-whore
Tim Rowley is not a Netscape developer. No resources were taken away from other parts of the browser to get MNG in. If he wasn't working on MNG, he probably wouldn't be working on any other part of Mozilla either (except for PNG maybe).
If you want to make MNG files from scratch, use Animation Shop, which is included with Paint Shop Pro. They've supported it for a while. Beware though, the file sizes are huge, but hey, at least you did your part against UNISYS.
Now all that's needed is MMG support in ANYTHING AT ALL!!!!!!!!!!
Tiff also SUPPORTS the LZW compression that Unisys owns the patent for, however many applications that use TIFF do not, and it's not used all the freaking time, like it is in GIF.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Someone's tagline once said "cutting and pasting from the linked Slashdot article is not Informative... it's Redundant". I agree.
I would rather see some discussion more on-topic, such as why this is good, or bad... not "for your convenience" cut and pasting from obvious links.
I'm glad that people are excited about this format. I hope that in 5 years it becomes a well-used standard. PNG is just starting to catch on in the graphics industry, although it's nowhere near as well supported as say TIFF.
And that's too bad.. you always know PNG video frames are lossless, and they're lots smaller than pure uncompressed stuff.
More support than GIMP is needed I am afraid. This is needed in things like Broadcast 2000, where it might make an impact.
Given that Slashdot and a million other websites continue to use GIF *how many* ? years after PNG, I think MNG will take just as long to gain acceptance.
But Mozilla MNG support's still nice, for small niche websites where you know the audience is capable of viewing it without a Netscape 4 plugin and IE control.
tif[f] is a widely used format. Developed by Aldus (now part of Adobe) and Microsoft. Tiff also contains the LZW compression that Unisys own the patent for...
K
Actually, the signature used in PNG/MNG is a *very* cool hack. By including both the LF and CR ASCII bytes, a properly constructed PNG/MNG decoder can determine whether or not the image file was misconverted as it passed through different computer systems than the one it was created in (ie. the file might have been sent in text mode by accident).
Did we _REALLY_ need a new form of animated graphics? Oh well. Maybe it'll lessen the amount of Java (gag) banner ads that have been appearing lately. D: