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JPG Compression - The Bandwidth Saver
Mr.Tweak writes "TweakTown has posted an article entitled "JPG Compression - The Bandwidth Saver". An article for webmasters and site owners showing how they can significantly reduce the amount of bandwidth they use by compressing JPG images, one of the most common formats for web images. If you own a website and don't yet have knowledge in the field of JPG compression, you should find this very interesting indeed - Save money on bandwidth and please viewers at the same time with quicker loading webpages. They also talk briefly at JPEG2000."
Although jpg compression is definitely helpful, the article forgets to mention that two image formats are supported by all browsers. GIF being the second.
In addition, 4.0 and newer browsers support Portable Network Graphics (PNG).
GIFs should be used for vector based graphics
No they shouldn't. Use PNG for still images. Use SWF (now an open format) or MNG (not much browser support yet but works in Mozilla and Konqueror) for animations.
and provides a better overall quality/size advantage when done right.
PNG can be 10% smaller than GIF when crushed properly.
Will I retire or break 10K?
At my last job, we wondered why our carefully tuned images looked like shit on AOL. We found they were recompressing our jpegs to make them much smaller (and thus lower quality). So we now send AOL really high quality jpegs so that our images don't get trashed as badly by AOL.
Plato seems wrong to me today
I'd like to see some kind of lossy PNG
That's JNG (JPEG Network Graphics) which is JPEG wrapped in PNG-style chunks along with an optional alpha (transparency) channel. Mozilla will display them and IrfanView will process them.
The JNG spec is available somewhere on the PNG web site, http://www.libpng.org/pub/png