PNG Second Edition Is a W3C Proposed Recommendation

Quadraphonic writes "I'm surprised I haven't seen this yet: PNG Second Edition is a W3C Proposed Recommendation. Thoughts?"

Comments

Great!

[TomGroves]

I look forward to seeing it in action in 2006

Re:Great!

[Universal Nerd]

I like PNGs, I really do, I try to use them whenever I can but the problem is that MSIE doesn't render the alpha channel correctly without a CSS hack to the IMG tag.

I agree with you, I'll be looking forward to seeing PNGs used in mainstream sites (such as Slashdot) in 2006, if not later.

Good ideas without corporative support will always remain just that, good ideas.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

the problem is that MSIE doesn't render the alpha channel correctly without a CSS hack to the IMG tag.

So, what's the problem? Why cater the status quo? If MSIE sucks, tell people that that's the case!

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

You can still use single bit transparency with IE without any hacks, making it a fine replacement for GIF. But, alas, this is one of the risks of having one browser have such a large market share... slower innovation.

Re:Great!

[brianmf]

Maybe some of you could take the time to sign a petition to help get (proper) PNG support in MSIE?

Re:Great!

[Universal Nerd]

the problem is that MSIE doesn't render the alpha channel correctly without a CSS hack to the IMG tag.

I do, but if that did any good Ralph Nader would be president of the good ol' U. S. of A.!

Re:Great!

[JabberWokky]

Jumping in here briefly, I'll mention that IE for the Mac appears to support alpha properly, leading me to think it may be related to how IE for Windows handles the client area (i.e., the drawing methods in the page).

And second - what is the CSS hack? That would be handy for people to do as an interm fix. (And real world html is all about interm hack fixes to get things to look right).

--
Evan

Re:Great!

[Cecil]

No, the reason IE for Mac displays PNG alpha correctly is because it's a completely different browser, different rendering engine, different CSS support, the works. No one is entirely sure why this is, but it's pretty clear as most of IE-Windows' bugs don't happen in IE-Mac.

Mind you, IE-Mac has a whole *host* of problems all of it's own...

Re:Great!

[superyooser]

It's a good cause, but not likely to budge MS. See this recent Q & A.

Host: Rob (Microsoft)
Q: when will IE get transparent PNG support?

A: Ian, I'm sorry, I can't answer that question for you

Here's another choice piece about the future of IE, or lack thereof.

Host: Brian (Microsoft)
Q: when / will there be the next version of IE?

A: As part of the OS, IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation.

Later, Brian of MS says, "Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1. Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS."

So, enhancements to the underlying OS are necessary for the features that most other modern browsers have, such as transparent PNGs, popup blocking, and tabbed browsing? Obviously, they have no intention of ever adding these features to IE. This is awful. It's staggering that AOL just snubbed the most innovative browser on the planet to make a deal to use a stagnant, obsolete 1998 browser until 2010 (Re: this story).

Re:Great!

[shaitand]

"It's staggering that AOL just snubbed the most innovative browser on the planet to make a deal to use a stagnant, obsolete 1998 browser until 2010 (Re: this story)."

The agreement gives AOL the right to use it, it doesn't require them to... and it doesn't require MS to make it possible to do so, with IE6sp1 as the last standalone browser and from here on in the browser being completely integrated into the OS it is highly unlikely that MS will be willing to seperate it, they will without a doubt say it's inseperateable from the OS.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Later, Brian of MS says, "Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1. Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS."
So, enhancements to the underlying OS are necessary for the features that most other modern browsers have, such as transparent PNGs, popup blocking, and tabbed browsing? Obviously, they have no intention of ever adding these features to IE. This is awful.

If you turn on your noodle and read between the lines, what he's saying is that older operating systems won't be able to get IE 7, for example. Not that there will never be popup blocking or transparent PNG support, but that if someone with Windows 98 wants the latest version of IE (with those features implemented), they will need to upgrade their whole operating system to Windows XYZ.

Re:Great!

[damiam]

AlphaImageLoader hack for IE.

Re:Great!

[spongman]

Yeah, and while you're at it, you can bitch directly to the IE PSS team here.

PNG version 2??

[mhesseltine]

Honestly, who the hell is using version 1? Most pages still serve JPEG and (God help us) GIF files for images. Was there a feature missing from PNGv1 that was slowing adoption?

As much as I agree with the idea of standards, the fact is, if no one bothers to follow them, or implement them, what's the point?

Re:PNG version 2??

[Universal Nerd]

Missing feature is support for alpha-channels in MSIE.

Single bit transparency (GIFs) suck compared to pages with alpha channel transparencies but since MSIE can't render them correctly they fail to make the market.

Oh, there's another problem - lack of a good program to save PNGs. AFAIK, Gimp is the best PNG generator around all the Windows photo editing software I used to use (Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro) generated terribly large PNGs, I used to save them as GIFs.

Re:PNG version 2??

[AnamanFan]

I use a lot of PNGs with client's websites.

The proplem is the non-existant Alpha support on MSIE. Every other [modern] browser reads the alpha beautifully.

For creating PNGs, outside of using GD in PHP, I use Fireworks which so far does the trick as long as you use the Export Preview function, not the native 'save as..' function. WAY better than GIFs by far!

Personally, you have to individual check on each image that comes into your browser to know who's using what. PNG is used more than you think. But I still wish MSIE would wise up to the alpha problem.

Re:PNG version 2??

[mhesseltine]

Missing feature is support for alpha-channels in MSIE.

And this is the fault of PNG how? If IE choses not to follow a standard (surprise, surprise), does it require writing a new standard? Do people really think that MS will suddenly support alpha transparency in PNGv2?

This sounds like a great way to encourage people to move away from MSIE. Show them nicely renderd alpha transparent PNG files in Mozilla, and comparable files in MSIE and let them see that IE is in fact, crippled.

Re:PNG version 2??

[mhesseltine]

Please see my other post in response to essentially the same question.

P.S. 2 minute posting time limit sucks!! How about incremental increases, 30 seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes. That way, if you only post a couple of comments, no problem. If you're a troll, you have to wait more and more to crapflood?

Re:PNG version 2??

[metalhed77]

Oh, there's another problem - lack of a good program to save PNGs. AFAIK, Gimp is the best PNG generator around all the Windows photo editing software I used to use (Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro) generated terribly large PNGs, I used to save them as GIFs.

What's that mean? My site uses both photoshop and imagemagick to generate PNGs and they come out the same as gimp. An algorithm is an algorithm. I think that maybe gimp might default to PNG8 while photoshop defaults to PNG24. Either way its customizable. Photoshop has full PNG compatibility.

Re:PNG version 2??

[friedegg]

There's a lot of difference in how images are compressed. Photoshop produced PNGs are not the most size efficient, and might lead someone to believe GIF would be a better choice.

Re:PNG version 2??

[MattCohn.com]

I am mad as hell about my lack of PNG support, VERY mad, but that's not going to change anything. Show people a crippled page in IE, whether the browsers fault or the page's, and people will blame you. They will just move along to the next page and not consider switching. I'm sorry, but to users you are a Jahova's witness, and they don't give a shit.

Re:PNG version 2??

[RhettLivingston]

Gimp, like almost every other GNU program I've ever needed to run, runs fine on Windows. So, what's the problem?

I work completely in a Windows environment and we use PNGs a lot to compress screen shots. They come out way smaller than JPGs and maintain all of the colors unlike GIFs. We capture them with SnagIt, a windows program, and we use them in MS Word. I wouldn't say they have no support, they work way better in MS Word than the alternatives, just that the vast majority of users in the world don't know that they exist. That's life in a world where the overwhelmingly vast majority of content producers are not literate in things like the pros and cons of gif versus png.

Now if we ...

[altp]

... Could get web masters to stop using gifs and jpegs. Adaptation of PNG moves slowly, at least here, for 2 reasons.

1) Web masters are more of a designer than a tech, they don't follow all the newest developments (most here still use HTML 1.0).

2) Netscape 4.x doesn't load them, and administration feels that it is important to support the people that refuse to upgrade.

Again, thats here ... but i'm sure these behaviors flow to many places.

Altp.

Re:Now if we ...

[Copperhead]

While I can see (and would welcome) PNG replacing GIF, I don't think it's in a position to replace JPG. PNG doesn't do lossy compression, dithering, etc., which JPG does well.

Re:Now if we ...

[questionlp]

It's a hackish solution and probably not the most optimal way of doing it, but for the code used on my website, I detect the browser and make a loose check to see if the browser is version 5.0 and up or Opera, or not. If the former is true, set the image extension to ".png", else, set the image extension to ".gif" (I don't have any JPEGs since the only images I have are buttons or basic images that all fit into 216 colors).

Re:Now if we ...

[Universal Nerd]

Not to mention that, usually, JPGs are smaller than PNGs.

Re:Now if we ...

[Tumbleweed]

> Netscape 4.x doesn't load them, and administration feels that it is important to support the people that refuse to upgrade.

I say support them with a hammer-blow to the back of the head.

In front of their children (as a lesson).

Dancing on their grave afterwards is optional (see spec).

Re:Now if we ...

[fredrikj]

For photos, yes, but rarely for repetitive images with few colors (which most web graphics are).

Re:Now if we ...

[friedegg]

It does, but IE is lazy, and just says */* without assigning a quality value.

Here are some examples of the HTTP Accept header...

IE:
image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/msword, application/x-shockwave-flash, */*

Mozilla:
text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,tex t/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,video/x-mng,image/pn g,image/jpeg,image/gif;q=0.2,*/*;q=0.1

Opera:
text/html, image/png, image/jpeg, image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, */*;q=0.1

You can use content negotiation. You leave the file extension off and let the browser choose which file format it wants. (W3C does this with some graphics) To get it work right with IE (And choose GIF over PNG), I had to assign a slightly lower quality level to PNG on the server. It ended up being more hassle than it was worth. It's been a while since I did it, but if I remember correctly, IE wouldn't cache anything using this either. So now I just use 8-bit PNG and pray for the day IE catches up.

Re:Now if we ...

[KewlPC]

JPEGS aren't going anywhere. They beat PNG (as far as file sizes are concerned) hands down for pictures, game screenshots, etc., basically anything that doesn't have large contiguous areas of the same color. The PNG people even acknowledge this.

For things that DO have large, contiguous areas of the same color (like website graphics, or the mostly black "picture of Earth from Mars" photo), PNG is usually better (file size-wise), especially if those graphics can be reduced to 8-bit indexed color.

Re:Now if we ...

[Jugalator]

JPEG's are also worse when compressing line art and similar graphics since the format introduce JPEG artifacts that are especially visible in high contrast graphics such as charts, etc.

The best PNG compressor for Windows

[friedegg]

Is PNGOUT by Ken Silverman. It's even beats PNG Crush most of the time. I create my PNG's in Photoshop, and then when I use PNGOUT before going live.

Re:I have a thought...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I've done the gif/png comparisons on filesize for Slashdot, and they're really missing out on some good bandwidth savings. It would also be a nice "open" gesture and perhaps persuade a few other people to follow. PNG + CSS could be of tremendous help to Slashdot.

What's the point?

[Masa]

I just made few PNGs with GIMP and used them at a web page. To my surprise, the pictures didn't look right because the IE6 doesn't seem to support PNGs correctly. The whole point of using the PNGs at the page was that they offer nice support for transparency and alpha channel. But IE6 rendered the pictures using black background and the whole page looked like a shit.

I'm not saying that we have to slow down the technological progress because IE can't support standards, but come one, if the major player isn't supporting even the older version of the standard (PNG v.1 is a part of the W3C standards, right?) then how could we expect anyone to support yet another version?

Re:What's the point?

[vadim_t]

Even without fancy transparency features PNG is still very useful.

First, unlike GIF it supports more than 256 colors
Second, just like GIF it's lossless (It could be said that conversion to 256 colors is a loss though)
Third, it's a bit smaller than GIF

JPG can't deal properly with thin lines. Which means that if you want a good encoding of a picture that contains lines and text, like color comics you have to use JPG or GIF. If the comic happens to have many colors then PNG is the only thing that will look good.

PNG support in MSIE 5.5

[ptaff]

You can actually display alpha layered PNGs on Microsoft Internet Explorer, starting from version 5.5, using an ugly workaround using DirectX and a CSS3 directive.

Now, be prepared: it will work _only_ with tags, so no alpha for background images yet. Still, it's an improvement.

I still don't get why they didn't implement it properly in the first place, let's not talk about it, it's a 1996 recommendation and I'm already so mad and frustrated by their bogus workarounds covering their flaws (XML parser bugs, ignores the IGNORE directive in DTDs, anyone?)

Anyway, the trick is to use a CSS on all images:

img { behaviour: url('/path/to/.htc'); }

using the .htc file coming from here:
Thanks

You just have to point to a 1x1 spacer GIF in the .htc source.

Works pretty fine, is compatible with Opera/Mozilla/IE and _at last_ you can get rid of 1988-oriented GIFs.

Should you want to support IE 5.5, welcome to the future of the web of yesterday :)

Recompression

[Omniscient Ferret]

If you want to recompress the bloated PNGs written by Photoshop, a guide to PNG optimization is available.

Update from spec 1.0 to 1.2

[Omniscient Ferret]

I think this is just considered an update from the PNG spec 1.0 to spec 1.2 (or, maybe 1.3). The PNG home site mentions version 1.1 (with color correction) & 1.2 (with international text). The text in the linked recommendation mentions that it's the same text as the ISO standard (except for "cover page and boilerplate differences"); the PNG news page mentions that the two announcements are related, but without mentioning why they're related. It mentions "errata and clarifications" from PNG spec 1.0.

Bleh. Anyway. It's not about PNG 2.0 or anything. If you want animation, you still have to use MNG.

Re:Update from spec 1.0 to 1.2

[capnjack41]

I'd really like to see MNG get more attention and support. Last I checked you have to get special plugins for it, to view them with IE. Not sure if Mozilla supports them yet.

I want to get the hell away from GIFs, because I don't want to have to get a license to use it (not like it really matters), and plus being limited to 256 colors sucks.

"Second edition" is a minor spec update

[smcv]

This isn't PNG 2.0, it's PNG second edition: think of it as being like the difference between Win98 and Win98 second edition.

When the W3C release a "second edition" recommendation, it's mostly editorial changes - see the changes summary in the PNG recommendation (or see XML 1.0 second edition, which is the current XML spec, for an example of another "second edition").

The linked spec is basically compatible with the original version, but some of the conditions for conformance have been tightened up (not that that matters for IE purposes since it didn't conform anyway) and the necessary verbiage to use the text as an ISO standard has been added (W3C policy is to release "recommendations" which are treated like standards, but this one is actually going to be a standard in theory as well as in practice).

At last!

[ariels]

Just in time for IPv6, too!

Re:I have a thought...

[Repugnant_Shit]

And for all the people who bitch about MS and IE, who cares if your site can't be viewed in a buggy browser? You all use Linux with Mozilla anyway, right?

Re:I have a thought...

[DeltaSigma]

Oh and we all make websites about Linux and Mozilla anyway right? ...right?

Making PNG work with Internet explorer

[fizbin]

The key to getting PNG to work properly with Internet explorer is to flatten your image down to 256 colors (indexed). This also allows only single-bit transparency.

This is what I did with my user image for livejournal. Sure, it's not as nice as full 24-bit transparency, but it's everything you were able to get with (non-animated) GIFs, except with smaller files. (And, unlike most GIF usage, legal without buying a license)

Doing this to an image inside GIMP is pretty simple: Image->Mode->Indexed.

There's also the bizarre CSS3 trick mentioned in other comments to this article; I haven't tried that yet.

Re:Great! more unproven links and puffery

[spongman]

Well, I'm sory to prove you wronge yet again, but when I was working at Microsoft I saw plenty of feature requests and bugs that were passed to us from our product team's PSS liason via just such a page (it was a different page, but the same concept). The feature requests were considered toward the beginning of the product schedule, and the bugs were continuously triaged and entered into the bug database and fixed according to their assigned priority.

you are the lamest of trolls.

Re:Great! more unproven links and puffery

[spongman]

Where I have worked, technical people would axe-murder you.

Would that make them overzealots then?

Takes one to know one, I guess....

Put your browser through the PNG transparency test

[Trogre]

To see if your browser is up-to-date with PNGs, take this test