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]

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).

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??

[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.

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 ...

[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).

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.

"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!