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What Is The Future of PNG?
miladus writes "The GIF patent (held by Unisys)
will expire on June 20. C|Net wonders
whether that will also mean that PNG "will lose its original
reason for being". Remember Burn All
GIFs? " My hope would be that at this point PNG can stand on its own technical merits, rather then on ideological merits.
Unfortunately even half my coworkers don't know what a PNG is. I try to send them a UML diagram made from DIA and they demand a readable format :(
--------
Free your mind.
until GIF gives us more than Alpha channel with more than 1 bit :)...
I am dying for full PNG support in all major browsers... the 256 levels of transparency alone make it worth while!
Because everyone wants 256 color GIFs.
PNG does everything GIF does, only a million times better.
to cd
Who wants to buy me a nice shiny patent?
I wonder, will this show up on eBay like so many other patents?
Vonal Declosion
You can't get rid of a graphics file format once it's out there.
GIFs are limited to 8-bit colour depth, no alpha layer etc. etc. PNG is a standardised, open format with support for lossless encoding of full colour graphics with transparencies.
:)
Saying that GIF becoming patent unencumbered is going to reduce use of PNG is like implying that when the original patents ran out on horses & carriages people gave up their cars and reverted. Ain't gonna happen
large file size- much larger than gif or jpg
poor standardization- alpha in particular is different accross platforms and browsers (IE is the worst offender here)
little exposure- even my grandma has heard of jpg but few people including "web developers" have heard of PNG, even after years of existance.
That said if you have to mix text and graphics PNG is the way to go as it will not trash the picture like gif and won't pooch the text like jpg.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I don't know why more people don't use PNG. It's a great format. For photorealistic images JPG is best, but for logos or other types of graphics and drawings, PNG is great. I hope that we start seeing widespread use of vector-based graphics in the near future, though.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Just because PNG is 'better' than GIF, doesn't mean it'll win.
GIF has such a huge head start...
GIF's drawbacks are well known, and are not limited to the patent. For example, 256 colour palletes are very restrictive especially now virtually everyone has high colour displays. PNG isn't going anywhere, I use it for all my images and I'm very pleased with the results. If IE's support was a bit better things would be perfect.
Until IE fully supports the format, it might as well be dead. Nobody who wants the Alpha Channel support can use it in IE6 so it pretty much just sits there, an unused option.
Since IE apparently won't be getting an update until the next version of Windows, I don't see much changing.
It also doesn't help that creating PNGs with Alpha Channels isn't as easy as it can be in some apps.
It appears that the patent covering the LZW compression technology is about to expire... LZW is the compression used in GIFs.
Only thing GIF has what PNG does not is animation support... PNG wins in everything else. And most of the GIF animations I have seen do nothing else than annoy so i'm not sure if the lack of it in PNG is a good or bad thing after all.
PNG is not just an alternative to GIF. PNG has things like Alpha Blending, Gamma Correction and Huge color depth (up to 48 bits, I believe).
So you can really do a lot of cool things with PNG that you can't do with GIF's.
The problem is that without browser support this is like having a CD library in the 70s... Useless. And as long as browsers don't handle PNG's properly it's also chicken & egg problem.
I hate to say it, but we're pretty much at Microsoft's mercy with mainstream PNG usage.
.: Max Romantschuk
Dont let SCO buy the patent! They might sue everyone who ever saved a GIF file!
--
One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
Patented or not, GIF is an antiquated compression algorithm which performs quite poorly compared to PNG. There is descent browser support for PNG, and it can also do some nifty things which GIF cannot -- most importantly alpha transparency as opposed to binary transparency.
It seems most people just don't care enough to use PNG though, so I wouldn't expect it to take over the net very soon.
At the weekend I removed all the GIF's from my project and replaced them with PNG's, because I'd had a submission (understadably) rejected to savannah.gnu.org because of this issue.
I'd only been using GIF's because my project outputs web pages and uses transparent images to render a nice customisable user interface (e.g. tabs) in a way that can only be achived with transparent images - and realistically most people use IE and it has problems with PNG transparency that would require me to use lots of VB scripting in IE just to get IE to behave in the manner I wanted.
Does this mean free GNU projects will be able to use GIF's, or are there still other parent related issues with GIF images?
The last time I used GIF was for some humorous animation... and in either case, animated GIFs should be kept off of the Internet.
I use PNGs for everything graphics related today except when there are special compatibility reasons (some tools only work with BMP, PCX etc) or when space must be cut for photo-like images, in which case I use JPEG.
PNG generally compresses better than GIF, it has more features, and you can have as many colors as you want. So for me personally, it's certainly not as much a matter of ideology as it is a matter of functionality.
My hope would be that at this point PNG can stand on its own technical merits, rather then on ideological merits.
It certainly does for me. PNG tends to display colors more accurately than GIF, has cleaner dithering, and has much better transparency than GIF. It also generates smaller files for complex/large images. But, Internet Explorer once again holds us back. IE doesn't do transparency AT ALL for PNG images. It doesn't even use the page color, or white, just a flat 50% gray. Once IE supports PNG properly, a lot more web developers will feel comfortable using it. Curse you and your "standards", Microsoft.
Jasin Natael
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
IIRC, GIF really specialized in 256-color paletted images, and any extensions to that along the lines of full 32-bit color were kind of a hack, and were never very popular. PNG, on the other hand, is a great compressed lossless format that seems to cleanly support 4 channels. I've used it plenty when storing graphics for programming purposes, and have never had any kind of problems.
It seems that the only reason GIF was around in the first place is because computers were slow, and then later (instead of lossy jpegs) for displaying little images with text in them in web pages. Since PNG does that now and does it better, I think there's no reason to ever go back to GIF.
Sure, the readers and writers might now be legally free or whatever, but anyone who really wanted to use GIFs has been able to do it anyway (it's not like all along Photoshop wasn't able to export, and Explorer and Netscape weren't able to view them), and there is support for better formats pretty much everywhere now, that I don't foresee any changes in the status quo regarding GIF use.
-S
What about the animation that gifs bring to the web? I know that no one was using the animated functionality of a gif back when the PNG specs were being drawn up but I think it's time to look back into it. It at least give users an alternative to Macromedia Flash especially whilst using GIMP.
Long live open source
___ Shout Central - Crushes your nuts!
PNG is far better IMHO, because it's 32bit, as opposed to GIF's limitation of 8bit. Also, PNG supports 8bit transparency, which allows AA to work with transparency.
Only problem I have with PNG is that IE 5.5 doesn't support it's transparency properly without some extra code.
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
I wonder if GD will go back to gif or stay with png
If you're getting larger file sizes with PNG, then you're using a program that creates PNG poorly.
When I converted all the graphics on my site over from GIF to PNG, I saved bandwidth. If I did my comic in GIF instead of PNG, the graphics would be much larger than they are now.
use pngcrush or some other kind of tool to optimize them if your stuck using an older version of Photoshop (some versions of photoshop have lousy PNG support) or get some shareware or free software program that supports PNG properly.
JPEGS will still be better for 24 bit color images, but with the right program PNGs will beat out GIFs.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
If I well remember, I've done a presentation about file format and png has some features that doesn't exists in .gif, especially full 32 bits colors (alpha + rgb), wich doesn't really exists in .gif.
I would personally prefer let .gif like it is actually, and upgrade .png if more features are required. For me, .gif is for little icons in web page, little photo. But full screen photo that requires no compression (like game screenshot, mpeg screenshot), .png is the right format.
My 2 cents
"We haven't evaluated the new recommendation for PNG, and it remains to be seen whether the new version will have an effect on the use of GIF images," said Unisys representative Kristine Grow. "If so, the patent situation will have achieved its purpose, which is to advance technological innovation. So we applaud that."
When the serial killer is born that executes corrupt lawyers, leeches and vampires, this Kristine Grow whore should be killed too.
I'm tired of people who just want money standing in the way of real workers, and then claiming that they're blood leeching is beneficial.
God spoke to me
GIF supports animation, but it is not supported in PNG.
I know with MNG, you can do animation plus all advantages of PNG. However in reality, not many people are using MNG yet, which make the support for MNG almost non-existant (even our favorite browser has removed support for MNG due to resignation of its maintainer, at least for now)
we still have many things to do to evangeliszed the use of MNG (imagine p0rn ad with full alpha transparency! sigh...) before we can get a full-blown replacement for GIF. Remember newbies will definitely say: `Wow! GIF does animation but PNG does not, PNG is a crap.' Regardless whether GIF has LZW patent or not.
PNG is good for large pictures, but GIF has animated format (GIF89). PNG doesn't have this feature.
Also, IE still doesn't support correctly PNG
And GIF compression is generally better for 16 colors picture (icon and small images) than PNG.
I think that the two formats are just complementary.
----
I need a Sino-Logic 16. Sogo-7 data-gloves, a GPL stealth module...
Some people don't think so.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
You may wish to look at this thread on comp.compression
Just as we in Europe are often affected by US patents, even thought he patent itself isn't valid here, now might be your turn to be affected by patents outside your jurisdiction.
I have an include file tricking the transparancy into working here , but this geezer has done it a more elegant way...
Until IE gets a major update it's the only way to ensure that your PNG stuff works cross-browser. And with PNG's superior colour depth and transpancy there really is no reason to NOT at least toy with using PNG's a little any more...
MNG files, which are animated PNGs.
In this country you are not allowed to patent a mathematical method nor a computer program, so presumably the LZW / GIF patent issue was never a problem? I guess the situation is similar in other countries.
..... it supports more colours than GIF; isn't lossy like JPG; and reads into applications other than the one that wrote it, unlike TIFF ;-)
I don't see how this will kill off the PNG format
A non-story. Ting! Next, please.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
GIF and JPG each do something quite well. GIF is well-suited for the rendering of static elements with a relatively small palette, like webpage design elements. It doesn't support photo-realistic images, but that's OK - a GIF can make a very small, efficient file that can load quickly. And it's been supported since the earliest days of the Internet.
JPG compliments GIF by providing a way to display high-quality photo images, and you can control the size of the rendered file by deciding how much you're willing to discard. Again, it's supported by every editor and browser, and it's been around since the beginnning.
PNG is a superior format to GIF from a technical perspective, and it's not encumbered by the LZW patent. However, from the perspective of most mainstream users, it doesn't solve a problem that actually affects them (they don't know or care about the Unisys patent issue), it isn't perfectly supported by all mainstream browsers and servers in use today, and it's a johnnie-come-lately to the standards wars.
Like it or not (I think it kinda sucks), most web developers seem to do things one of three ways: if they need small static elements they use GIF, for photos they use JPG, and if they need fancy-schmancy stuff they use Flash. And nobody worries whether or not platforms other than Windows with the latest IE can render their site, anyway. So maybe PNG will slowly become more common - it is a better format for the most part than GIF is, and pretty much all current browsers and servers (going forward - not some of the older versions that are still in use) support it pretty well out of the box. Really, what matters most is the bottom line (especially once the LZW patent is dead) - can PNG produce a better browsing experience for a site's users? If it can, it'll get used. If not, then it's dead.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
My hope would be that at this point PNG can stand on its own technical merits, rather then on ideological merits
The word is "than", not "then". And while I'm here, it's "definitely", not "definately", "your" is not a substitute for "you are" and vice versa, and we certainly don't make plurals of words by tacking on an apostrophe followed by an S. We also don't use the word "where" in place of "were". We also spell "you" fully rather than using "U", and we should read more.
- IP
Of course MNG has even less support than PNG, but thanks to Jason Summer's MNG plugin anyone using a Netscape-plugin-compatible user agent or IE can see them.
~~~
Hopefully Redhat makes --enable-lzw the default in their ImageMagick builds now!
Back in the day, JPGs were known for better compression, but with graphical loss. GIFs were known for preserving appearance, but with less compression than JPG.
Then PNG comes in...
- Open Source/Open Standard: cool
- Lots of options of graphic artists: cool
- even less compression: suckage, but whatever, people who really care about their net experience these days have broadband
PNG may be superior, but it suffers from being obscure and being too technically oriented. I remember when Animated GIFs were tough to create without a "wizard". I seriously doubt your average consumer will care about the added layers and alpha "stuff" that's supported by the PNG format.
Kind of like how Firebird may be technically superior to, say, Internet Explorer, but very few people know of Firebird, and few among those who do know about it would know how to use all its features. IE just "works" for them.
PNG rocks, but until the likes of many Photo CD "developing" companies and other consumer-oriented image business start using the PNG format, people will still only know a world of GIFs, JPGs, and BMPs.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Only thought of this after I clicked "Reply", but I think there should be a law for patents that if anything has been 'free' for so long, shouldn't be patented so there isn't a great deal of confusion over the royalties issue.
And all forms of communications shouldn't be patented either. Imagine if someone patented HTML...
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
Not quite.
The background used is that saved in the PNG file, which you *can* specify, just like with GIFs.
And you can use alpha transparency via an ActiveShow style filter. Read this.
is that PNG will never see large scale use until all of it's features are supported in IE. I would love to use PNG for everything, except that they look like hell in IE. And as much as I badger people about using Mozilla, they don't.
GIF does have full support in IE, and nobody seems to know that the patent even exists. Even those that do rarely care enough to even tell one person.
This is the truth and it sucks. PNG, better in every way, suffers for it.
MSIE will begin to die out soon, and all other browsers have PNG support -- Mozilla even has MNG support natively.
Do you really think people will 'upgrade' their Windows license just to get a browser update?
I like to look at pitchers of pretty girlz in png format
One bit, that ought to be enough for anybody... :-)
You can use a DirectX extension to get transparent pngs to display in IE.
It works reasonably well. But still nothing close to native support which is why I have to stick with gif's.
-- taking over the world, we are.
Watch.
Seastead this.
I went to saa e PNG thet would ba used by whetavar thay usa to post storias to sleshdot thet will taka tha pleca of then end than end meka tham hot pink, so whan thay raviaw en erticla thay heva to meka sura ell tha as end es era right.
I not trolling per se, I'm just trolling in general...
At least not to most consumers.
Beta suffered from the 1 hour 20 minute syndrome.
VHS was there with longer recording times (albeit with poorer images), and while Beta was trumpeting better image quality, Sony refused to license Beta, and it didn't record as long as VHS.
So the "common wisdom" is commonly wrong.
Sorry, dude.
If you go to Google's Image Search, you'll find that it supports GIF, JPEG and, indeed, PNG. This is either because of PNG gaining popularity recently (which most definitely is true), Google wanting to endorse better formats (not unlikely), or because of the email I sent Google some time ago requesting PNG image searching (not likely :).
... if saved as truecolour images. What really killed PNG, imnsho, was that the first graphics programs that implemented it simply did not allow users to create indexed PNG files. An 8-bit PNG image is smaller than an 8-bit GIF.
What many people also seem to forget, is that there is no excuse not to safe your PNG image with maximum compression once you are done editing: there will be no image quality loss.
And of course anyone seriously creating PNG images cannot do without PNGCrush, which can shave off every single bit of bloat. A crushed PNG image will look just as good as the original, but will be only a fraction of its size, and will be a lot smaller than a GIF would (1).
1: But not smaller than the JPEG. Lossless compression cannot compete with JPEG's lossy compression, and JPEG is still the format of choice for photographic images. For everything else you can and should use PNG.
Its not funny enough.
If IE had proper support for PNG since IE4 like MS said it did then I don't think you'd hear much talk of GIF today. Unfortunatly, MS continues to only partially support the standard, leading to it's poor uptake. Which is the real shame here.
The thing I find most annoying, is that the support for full alpha channels is in IE, you just have to use MS's proprietary "filters" CSS to get it. Since it would have been simple to just turn on that property for 32bit PNG images without making us use non-standard CSS, I see this as a direct attack against standards compliance by MS.
Does such a thing exist? Will it ever exist?
The way I see it, if I have an image and it's only 8 bit I'll use a GIF, otherwise I'll use a JPG, unless it contains text that needs to be readable in which case I'll use PNG.
Simple rule of thumb?
Summation 2
I wouldn't worry too much about the future of :o
/dev/tty0: Input/output error. :0 :)
PNG, it will stick around. Now MNG...thats a different story
Hmmm...the infamous "Burn all GIF's" website...
showing the rather disturbingly fanatic side of the (open-source?) movement. That page, and the people that wrote it, worry me. They need to calm down I think. Talk about PNG being redundant...
( Why am I suddenly thinking of ESR? )
And now for something completely different:
step 1) go to "Burn all gif's" website
step 2) scroll down
step 3) click on "Eric's homepage" link.
step 4) click on "A cookie message" link.
and then...possibly....something like this?
---
gpm[623]: oops() invoked from gpm.c(164)
gpm[623]:
gpm(pam_unix)[769]: session closed for user foo.
Fatal X error - Restarting
---
fun fun fun
I looked at lots of file options for my photography.
I wanted compressed lossless for all my negative scans.
PNG looked good, so I figured I'd give it a try.
It was a pain. The scanner program wouldn't save as PNG. Photoshop support wasn't too good, and many programs can't read them. ImageMagick which I use for batch conversion had some issues with it too (It was a while ago, I don't remember exactly what the problem was, but I think it had something to do with the way adobe handled png files)
So while I liked the Idea of using PNG, I settled instead on LZW compressed Tiff. And Jpegs for smaller images.
I like the idea of the PNG format, so hopefully it will continue making inroads, unlike the poorly named jpg2000.
PNG, as the GIF-killer, died long ago. Plagued by poor browser implementations and the popularity of GIFs from the very beginning, it still suffers from those problems today and is very rarely (more like never) used on normal websites.
The only place on the web I've seen PNGs in actual use were web pages talking about the format. Even Slashdot uses GIFs.
However, I do find PNGs very useful -- for an entirely different purpose. I use them as a lossless format for storing original copies of things like digital photographs... basically, the alternative to zipping up a bitmap.
In any case, propping up GIF and therefore Unisys is the only logical reason I can come up with that IE still does not support PNG properly.
Any other guesses?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Is PNG the Flac of the graphic image world?
Discuss.
Summation 2
PNG is used as part of MS Office Documents for their binary picture data, so one suspects that making it work in IE will make more things break elsewhere.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
What is the future of PNG?
PONG
I don't think browser support for PNG can be any WORSE, at least when it comes to what you considered "most important": Alpha transparency.
Thing is, they're still bigger files. The Web is still full of people on dialup, and to cram png files down the line when a smaller, optimized .gif or .jpg will do, that's just not good. The main use I see of png at our shop is as the originals for all Web graphics -- people use Macromedia Fireworks and its (bloated) pngs as their sources, and export to .gifs and .jpgs for the sites themselves.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
24-bit PNG:s with transparency are great. It definitely fills a purpose, but for some reasons it has not become widely used.
Let's say you create an image with a shadow, using 24-bit PNG:s you don't have to think about what background it will be used on. The whole color range of the site can be changed without having to change any images, just by loading another style sheet.
Unfortunately IE doesn't support 24-bit PNG:s and transparency as it should, but you can make it work using this hack.
You made teh funnay!
libGIF - ~800 lines of code, old as dirt, fast as hell.
vs.
libPNG+zlib+libMNG - ~1.4 MB of compressed unfinished stuff, age and speed low.
Yea, sign me up!
Seriously, anyone still wondering why it's not built into IE when GIF and JPEG and TIFF work so great is just oblivious. Yes, it's awesome, features galore, does things nothing... er.. few... er.. not too many other things already do very well.
Face it, the patent was the whole point. Read the PNG page, the first 3 paragraphs start with "We are better then TIFF because we have less features" and end with "but you're much better off using JPEG and TIFF for most things"...
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
A very niche image format.
Why? IE dones't draw them right w/o user intervention. Since 99.99999999 of people won't do anything that involves effort, and 95% of surfers use IW on Windows, nobody will ever use them for "mainstream" sites. Ever. Sorry.
However, for "niche" sites where you know your audience can see them, they totaly kick ass. Sad the rest of the world will never see them =(
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
Does this mean we might actually see another release of xv? John Bradley has been holding off on a new release for years because of the GIF patent issue. Ironically, perhaps the best feature that'll be in the new release will be built-in PNG support (as apposed to having to download a patch or a patched copy of xv to get this).
this was about Papua New Guinea.
Anybody else?
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
You can do transparent GIFs in IE without using script. Google for the PNG Internet Explorer CSS DirectX hack.
You should make sure your app is accessible to people who can't view the images at all. So people stuck with an IE6 browser will still survive. You can write a FAQ answer explaining that if they upgraded to free software they'd see better support for the w3c standard image format.
I use:
PNG -> XSANE scanned documents, receipts, bills (JPEG makes scanned paper look blurry and dirty).
JPEG -> XSANE scanned album covers (looks better than PNG somehow).
I can't see a place for GIF. GIF is for 1995-era web icons (and 1986-era porn) -- remember that command line program you used to use to look at GIFs from the BBS!
As far as I can tell, GIF still has that one leg up on PNG. I haven't seen any version of PNG that can do animations and that is supported within a browser. Ideally, I'd still like to see an open source alternative to Flash that would allow one to create animations with synchronized sound. Oh well... I'm part way through my C++ book now. :)
Un-news
Do you hear that sound?
That sound is what we call "flatulence of the mouth." It's where everybody starts talking about things that they do not understand as if they're an authority. In the end, it just sounds like a bunch of people farting.
So please folks, say "Excuse me" and open a window.
Thank you and have a good day.
...so I guess png can't stand on idealogical merits, at least not here.
Obviously if you are in a country where the Unisys LZW patent is valid this is illegal, but in eleven days time who's going to care?
Doh! You can do transparent PNGs in IE without using script. Google for the PNG Internet Explorer CSS DirectX hack.
I wonder if Microsoft's halfhearted support of PNG is deliberate. To be honest, it probably is, in an attempt to undermine open standards.
Ahem. Anyway, PNG is a format which would be superior to GIF in every aspect. Just a few problems...
1) Photoshop's PNG support sucks. It is entirely due to Photoshop that we have this insipid misconception that PNG is larger than GIF; if Photoshop would only compress PNG's decently, people would realize that this is false. Because unfortunately, most people are too lazy to use an optimizer along the lines of pngcrush.
2) IE/Windows' PNG support is awful. As I said, I believe that this is deliberate on Microsoft's part, given that they already have good PNG-handling code (in their AlphaImageLoader filter) and they simply refuse to use it as their default. Now, it is possible to use JavaScript -the scourge of the Net normally, but this is one of those points where it can be genuinely useful- to make IE apply the AlphaImageLoader filter to PNG images, but no one's managed to make a complete drop-in replacement that will apply to all PNG images im a page yet. It can be done, but it hasn't been done yet.
3) MNG support is nonexistent. Even Mozilla, the only browser which ever supported MNG, has removed it. This is a great shame.
Now, in the meantime, there actually is one use for images which PNG is ideally suited for, and where the transparency problems of IE/Win are not an issue: screenshots. The compression is good enough that particularly when dealing with computer-generated images, the file size isn't that much greater than JPEG, but there is no loss in image quality, which is especially important when grabbing screenshots of games or video. Screenshots are not transparent, as a rule, so IE/Windows has no problems. Unfortunately, it seems that this use of PNG has yet to be discovered by the mainstream.
PNG may also be good for certain types of wallpapeers, such as most computer-generated graphics or hand-drawn animation. Colors in these generally aren't as complex as they are in photographs, and the lossless compression of PNG works well under those conditions. Combine this with the fact that JPEG (the current de facto standard for wallpapers) has an inexplicable and yet undeniable hatred for the color red, and you have something which can better preserve these types of images. Worth considering, anyway.
Does anyone know why PNG wasn't designed to do lossy compression as well as lossless so it could be used for photos? Also, why doesn't it have simple animation capabilities?
I think the authors spent too much time worrying about alpha channels and other advanced features that are not much use on a web page. I say ditch it and start again with a new format.
Howard Stern was complaining that he couldn't open PNG files this morning.. "Why can't I get a bitmap or a JPEG?"
...both on my website, and for the figures I insert in my Master's thesis. No transparancy though, but I certainly find png very useful none the less. I'm glad .png exists, but this whole taking over the world thing. It's like Linux. Enjoy it for what it's worth. If it's superior, it will succeed in due time.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
wget http://www.slashdot.org
14:12:33 (30.08 KB/s) - `index.html' saved [39023]
grep -i "\.png" index.html | wc -l
0
grep -i "\.gif" index.html | wc -l
32
Food for thought.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I say this for 2 fairly good reasons. You can still view PNGs in all major browsers, it really just depends on what kinds of images you are making that will depend on how *good* they look. So if you stick to fairly simple images, a facet for which GIF is/was good for, PNG still is equal among browsers.
Secondly, I feel that PNG has a good foothold is in software development. Programs using some form of libpng seem to use the PNG images very well regardless of how simple or complex they may be. I have seen many a program using PNG for the application e.g. KDE and its childeren. I know I use PNG icons in my applications whenever possible. The two main venues in which i code in support PNG well enough to make my icons look good on screen.
A side note Java (JDK 1.2+) and Carbon support the use of PNG even though Carbon really tries to push tiff's. I do not understand any technical merits of tiff, however i don't like using them because they always seem to be so huge.
Mozilla people are dropping MNG, the difference is that MNG is not part of W3C recommandation.
Because that's what JPEGs are for.
As ever, Unisys misses the point of PNG's (presumed) success:
Patents motivate advancement of technological innovation by promising dollars. The inventors of LZW/GIF got those dollars by selling the patent to Unisys (who no doubt valued it based on their expected ability to license it). The inventors of PNG didn't use the patent system, so its success over GIF would at best fail to demonstrate anything at all about "the patent situation." At worst, it would show patent-based motivation is inferior to gift-based motivation when it comes to infrastructure like communication formats.What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
PNG is good for large pictures, but GIF has animated format (GIF89). PNG doesn't have this feature.
That is not entirely true. PNG does support animation, but rather than encapsulating the support into a monolithic file format designed for still images, it was decided instead to use a different suffix and allow the animation support to be developed independently. The format is known as MNG, and works very, very well.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Oh, fsck it, you know the rest.
"Just because [Linux] is 'better' than [Windows], doesn't mean it'll win.
[Windows] has such a huge head start..."
Popularity isn't the whole story.
As long as Billy Goat Gates doesnt suppport w3c standards in MSIE it wil thrive and row :)
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Read the other comments on this page. PNG Animation exists, and is called MNG.
Any PNG image is a valid MNG object, therefore creating MNG animations is a trivial task.
Alas browser support is non-existant except in certain builds of Mozilla, or by use of a plug-in/ActiveX component.
Excluding corner cases or brain-damaged implementations (such as older Adobe products), an 8-bit PNG will be smaller than a visually identical GIF.
Hahaha no. PNG is nowhere near the best lossless image format. Have you ever heard of BMF? PNG is routinely 40% larger than BMF. You can read an informed, scientific comparison of many formats at The Art of Lossless Image Compression (warning: there's an annoying pop-up. Oh well)
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
I'm considering trying to write a game during the summer. What would be the best format to use? I have two in mind, MNG and C16 (very simple format used in Creatures games). C16 is basically an encoding of the count of transparent pixels, followed by the count of opaque pixels and the data, and so on. There's a libc16 somewhere on sourceforge.
What do developers generally use for storing graphics for games? Do they roll their own fast to draw format like C16, or use something like MNG, PNG or even BMP?
I didn't discover what PNG was until I discovered OSS. Prior to that I found GIF format files everywhere. I still do.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
That's why you take matters into your own hands. IE 5.something and on does indeed have fully working support for PNGs with alpha channels.
Sure, it takes two short PHP functions or equivalent to get it working--one to identify IE on Windows and the other to create the image tag--but with that short step done I don't have to worry about it.
The advantage to this is that I can use the full spectrum of features in the PNG format, yet have my site rendered virtually identical in IE, Gecko, Opera and a bunch of other browsers on vastly separate platforms without any other special tweaks. That's what modern standards are for.
"Maybe not everyone has 300 bucks to float to Macromedia for their software in order to put up a small animation. I think there should be a good and viable alternative to gifs and flash."
MNGS and (SVG,SMIL).
PNG allows up to 16-bits per channel and has full alpha last time I checked. It can store just about anything, and it's non-lossy.
OTOH, you've got the tools that are supposed to allow you to have only 2n image converters, but the interchange formats for that (PPM, PBM, PNM, others?) seem to always have some shortcoming, and they always have to introduce yet another interchange format! PNG does it all in one neat little compressed format.
So forget about scrapping GIF in favor of PNG. Instead, scrap PPM, etc. in favor of PNG. If it doesn't support it already, PNG could be made to support arbitrary bit depth, and arbitrary channels (inverse hyperkinetic bump blending, or whatever you can imagine).
For the web, in most cases, PNG's capabilities don't add much--unless you are doing something really flashy with your website, in which case you probably use Flash, in which case you have nothing meaningful to say so I ignore you anyway. :)
At any rate, PNGs (at least the RGB channels) are properly supported by all the major browsers, so if something happens to compress better in PNG, or if you really need full color depth in a non-lossy image, why not use PNG?
That about sums it up: GIF--color depth not important, crisp lines important, compression important. JPEG--color depth important, crisp lines not important, compression important. PNG--color depth and crisp lines both important, compression not as important (or the image just happens to compress well with PNG).
In some ways, this is a variation on the "better, faster, cheaper" dilemma.
Now, the scenario that favors PNG may be less common, but it's nice to know we can reach for it when we need it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
PNG never got a grip on the animation thing.
If you wanted a moving image in a little loop, it was GIF everytime.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Even if PNG was a lousy format, it's gotten enough use
that it's here to stay. Fortunately, it's a pretty good
format.
What I wonder is if superior compression techniques, e.g.
LOCO/JPEG-LS will be incorporated into PNG? I was one of
the founders of PNG in 1995, but that was eight years of
technology development ago. Has someone tested PNG
against JPEG-LS in various real world applications?
What I meant when I said:
When you read it back in, you will only have 246 different colors in the image, regardless of how many where there originally.
was:
When you read it back in, you will only have 256 different colors in the image, regardless of how many were there originally.
I type too fast to look literate :/
-Rob
Good luck setting and keeping QT as a default type for IE. w2k asks you a zillion times if you really want to do that, then it does not do it right. Microsoft is agressively pushing it's inferior Windows Media Player with all the usual dirty tricks like that. This not only makes viewing PNG difficult or impossible, it also interfers with viewing the M$ avi file format which Windows Media Player treats as audio, displaying an "ambience" instead of your digicam's movie. Mozilla on the same computer works faster and better, in part because it respects you choice of plugins.
IE suffers from other technical problems due to the underlying OS. Long filenames with multiple endings confuse it, and there are other problems that a free software box would never have.
What you are really seeing here is the result of a long string of Marketing over Technology decisions at M$. Their technology gap is real and hoplessly large. Their ignoring PNG is just one more small reason to abandon the platform. The larger reason to abandon the platform is their root cause and their licensing terms. M$ just won't play nice.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
In other news, Mozilla dropped support for MNG/JNG (animated PNG/JPEG-like PNG) in its 1.5 branch. Mozilla 1.4 will support it, but unless someone steps up as a full time maintainer, 1.5 will not. Basically, the old maintainer felt that MNG/JNG support wasn't worthwhile, especially because its library took up as much space as the entire imglib -- roughly 240KB on Windows and 170KB on Linux. With some integration they were able to get it down to 135KB, but it stopped around there.
To be honest, that *is* quite a lot of space for just one format decoder to take. The decoder's writers should get a pat on the back though, because this was still the first MNG/JNG decoder with full support for the spec. (For those who were wondering, JNG is a subformat of MNG and provides non-animated JPEG-compressed images with alpha transparency. Supporting it requires only a few KB extra if MNG is already supported)
MNG/JNG was never used very much on the web, but neither was PNG before a few browsers started supporting it. Clearly if Mozilla drops support MNG/JNG will be dead in the water. In particular, the format provides 8-bit transparency with *animation*, which you would be hard pressed to find in any other open, web-optimized format.
Many theme authors used MNG to produce animated icons that blended with the background (The Mozilla Firebird throbber used one, in fact.) Now they will have to jump through hoops to get this feature. Or they will have to emulate it using GIF's (blegh.)
So far there have been a lot of complaints from the community about the removal of MNG/JNG, but in comparison, very little action. One person submitted an XPI (installer) to allow 1.5/nightlies users to regain MNG/JNG support, but obviously this is suboptimal -- for the format to gain popularity it's going to at least need to be in the default install! Interested persons should check out these bugs on Bugzilla:
(#195280) Removal of MNG/JNG support
(#18574) restore support for MNG animation format and JNG image format
Adam
I just happened to be listening to Howard Stern this morning and he was talking to Cabby. Supposedly Cabby had emailed him some pictures and Howard was bitching because he couldn't open them.
He said something along the lines of, 'You didn't send me a gif or jpg, instead it was some P something something file that I couldn't open.' Now this is in front of an audience of millions of people, not very good publicity.
Many moons ago there was a file format called PCX, it was quite simple, fast and used by a fair amount of software.
Then there was TGA if you wanted more than 256 colours.
and LBM, the image format of the Amiga.
I think TIFF may be dead too.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
You probably have a decent IT department or spend more time tuning your configuration than most users of that application do. Or perhaps you are not in anyone's address book.
Fireworks defaults to saving in PNG format.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
No that's not true, I shouldn't make it accessible to every user. User bases, like society at large, are full of mistfits and oddballs who have to be ignored in order to deliver a useful tool to the majority in a timely and efficent manner.
I know people who don't use a graphical interface, for example. I'm not going to spend time pleasing them when I could be adding new features that would improve the lot of >95% of other users.
My project is a project management tool which relies heavily on graphical representations of data. It's not possible to repesent all of the information in nearly as meaningful a way using no images. Expandable and collapseable thread views, Gantt charts, bar graphs and pie charts are never going to work in any useable sense in Lynx. I can make it 'bearable', but never actually very 'useful'.
I do not intend to add a text only version at the expense of adding new features, a text only version is very low down my list (however, it's designed to be easy for someone else to add simple HTML, WAP and text only interfaces if they wish).
Lastly I don't think that having an FAQ to explain why it doesn't work for 90+ % of users is an acceptable solution.
Ah yes, cheers.
r .html
This was actually what I was refering to when I (seemingly incorrectly) said 'VB hack'.
Example: http://webfx.eae.net/dhtml/pngbehavior/pngbehavio
Regardless of any reasons posted here I find that the most use I have for PNG (other than websites) is for a really cool tool I use to create SNES quality (vintage is good!) RPG's. In fact, PNG is the preferred graphics format even though BMP is supported. PNG just has so many advantages over most graphics. For it's quality it has relatively low byte counts. But then I have a very specific use of PNG.
http://www.gaminggroundzero.com
Rivendahl
... there is nothing that has not already been thought
How accurately are the colors displayed in the top GIF on this page?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Serious question. I see mention of apps like PNGcrush, etc, but I'm not a graphics guru. I crop scans, or create cheezy little button images for my web site, but that's the limits of my talent. I need something relatively simple.
Which free (beer) Mac or Linux apps can I use to (easily) create good PNGs? So far I've been using ColorIt! and GIFConverter on the (classic) MacOS side, and the PNGs seldom beat GIFs in size. A simple PNG converter that could read TIFF would be excellent for my purposes.
Constitutionally Correct
All rich media content developers have adopted PNG for may reasons.
;))
One of the better ones is alpha transparency with small file sizes. This is a godsend for developers wanting a seamless anti-aliasing against any other background colour for multi-media and web (except of course for good old microsoft, who STILL don't support PNG transparencey - wonder why ?
PNG is not going to go away any time soon as it is far more flexible than the GIF format.
Applications like Macromedia Fireworks use PNG as it's default file extension, anabling it to store layers, image slice data, guidelines etc.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Though MSIE, might. In fact, it is the only browser that has (intentional) trouble with PNG and is just one of several MS products being discontinued soon. Also, the increased awareness of stability and security issues is going to lead many users to Mozilla, Opera, and other top of the line tools. MSIE may be popular now, but only because the OEMs include it. When OEM support for MSIE goes, then browsers will have to compete on technical merits, an area where MSIE is last in line.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I'm a web developer. I'm not a Microsoft developer. This was a conscientious option.
P.S. I don't want to offend you personally. Lots of other people make the same mistake, and some of them really should know better.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
I don't think PNG is simply going to replace GIF, as I think was the original intent, but I do believe that older, less capable formats generally always make way for the newer, better formats -- cassette to disc, disc to hard drive ... Win95 to WinNT to WinXP (that's not backtracking any, is it?) ...
I suppose the point is that PNG is simply better than JPG and GIF for most purposes, so I expect that it will be the #1 image format on the web, if it isn't already, in the not-too-distant future.
Reasonably modern versions of IE do not support png.
Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows has displayed PNG images since 4.x.
IE does not support most transparent versions of PNG, except for the binary-transparent version that directly replicates the features of still GIF.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The mngs on the page you linked also worked in Mozilla Firebird (on a Debian PPC no less).
I am more excited to see LZW expire than GIF itself.
This is the king of the token based compression algorithms and although I am not sure how often Unisys has tried to enforce it, its nice to see it coming up as well.
"Sig free in '03!"
You mean they didn't lobby congress to extend patent terms by fifty years retroactively? Jeez, don't they know how to do business in the modern world?!
/
Ade_
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
What you're seeing is probably gamma correction. Try saving the PNG image without a gamma chunk (GIMP's Save As... dialog can do this), and your image's #660000 will match your page's #660000.
If it's not gamma, then it's probably differences in dithering. In high-color mode, some web browsers use different dithering algorithms on flat rectangles (e.g. backgrounds) vs. images. If this is your problem, the problem should show up with GIF images as well. Here, the best policy is to use a binary-transparent PNG, masking out what touches the edges and matches the background. (IE supports binary transparency in indexed images, just not alpha.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
Slashdot's enough of a mainstream site that going over to PNG would do a lot to increase the visibility and popularity of the format. There can't be more than a couple of dozen images to convert. At worst, even with major fiddling that's about 2 hours work. At best it's a batch job for XV or Gimp...
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Just curious if anyone knew of special types of images where the GIF compression will always win?
Everyone in this forum is saying "png is so great, you shouldn't get bigger files."... I believe, but is it always true?
You have to admire this woman's chutzpah. At least, once you clean up whatever you spit out on the keyboard when you read this.
A well-known witticism about the meaning of "chutzpah" is that it's the quality exhibited by a man who murders his mother and his father and then pleads the court for mercy because he's an orphan.
This isn't much different here. She's correct that the patent system is intended to advance technological innovation, but it was intended to do so by giving innovators a short-term head start in profiting off their innovation and ensuring that within reasonable time, that innovation would enter the public domain and become foundation for further progress. Only the second part is of more than marginal good to the public, and that's the part that Unisys hasn't gotten to yet.
What she's really claiming here could be restated as "Everybody wins when the wheel gets reinvented! Technological innovation is always good, whether it's innovation to accomplish something new and useful, or whether its effect is to fracture the market and deny the public a uniform standard!"
Please don't get me wrong on that last point; I'm not sorry that the PNG format got created, and even if the LZW patent hadn't made it necessary, I would have liked to see PNG get created, as a technically superior format (not to mention one whose elegance delights me as a geek.)
All that I object to is this Kristine Grow claiming that Unisys's submarine patent, by being the problem, deserves any sort of credit for the solution! It reminds me unpleasantly of what happened when the Innocence Project brought to public attention that so far it had found 109 inmates on Death Row who had been convicted falsely by the courts. Most of the district attorneys whose flawed prosecutions had sentenced innocent men to death responded that this didn't point to any need for change in the system; the fact that those 109 had been proven innocent before they were executed 'proved' that the system worked.
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
Well, then you just use MNG if you need animation.
What? Should I tell all users of IE not to visit the site until they have the appropriate plug-in to view the advertisements?
Will I retire or break 10K?
http://www.youngpup.net/?request=/snippets/sleight .xml
enjoy!
Since the stock answer for most support calls to MS is to reformat the disk and do a clean install, it reduces the likelihood that 3rd party apps and plug-ins are going to make it back onto the hard disk. This is especially true the 4th or 5th time around or if the technician is pressed for time -- and odd's are if it's a full MS shop, they're already over-booked and don't have time for more than the bare minimum.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
So what's the future of the Dodo? Damn liberal scientists always keep thinking that all species are worth saving. Well, maybe some things are just fated to extinction and to be mentioned again only in books that geeks read. Maybe the divine creator always intended the Dodo and the PNG to die a swift death? Why does it matter whether your lame format survives? Are you still whining about how Betamax is better even now that those newfangled DVDs are out? Get over it. You don't always have to side with the downtrodden. They might be downtrodden for a good reason. This is no Brown vs. Board of Education. This is GIF vs unpopular image format. Let the PNG die.
It's not bad advice. It's either that, or don't use PNG. I view the use of PNG to be more important that avoiding the CSS DirectX hack,
// The following is hereby placed in the public domain. The right to copy and modify is :) )
// need to do PNG hack
// correct this to point to a blank GIF file :) */f ";e r(sizingMethod='scale')";
// just go through the images collection, and "set" the PNGs using the PNG hack
// "setPngImage" method to make MSIE happy
// irrevokably granted to all.
// Copyright (c) Daniel Potter
//
// In your onLoad event, call "msiePngHack()" to watch all your PNG images
// be set to use transparency. (Note that your PNG files must end with
// a ".png" extension and is case sensetive - this is because the MIME type
// is not exposed to the JS code. If you have a file that does not end in
// ".png" then add something like "?f=.png" to the end to fake out this
// script - and certain versions of IE
var isIE = navigator.appName == "Microsoft Internet Explorer";
// if really Opera, this is corrected later
// Sets a PNG image browser-independently (use for roll over effects etc)
function setPngImage(img, src) {
if (isIE && isPng(src)) {
img.width = img.offsetWidth;
img.height = img.offsetHeight;
/* SLASHDOT ONLY: REMOVE THE SPACES IN THE STRINGS. These are intended to prevent "page widening" but screw up the code
img.src = "http://www.microsoft.com/homepage/gif/1ptrans.gi
img.style.filter = "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoad
img.filters(0).src = src;
} else
img.src = src;
}
// checks if the image is a PNG - ends in ".png"
function isPng(src) {
return src.length > 4 && src.substring(src.length - 4) == ".png"
}
function msiePngHack() {
for (i = 0; i < document.images.length; i++) {
var img = document.images[i];
try {
if (!(img.filters)) {
isIE = false;
return;
}
} catch (ex) {
isIE = false;
return;
}
setPngImage(img, img.src);
}
}
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I use PNG as my local format for most images simply because I can then fiddle with layers/text/blending/whatever at some time in the future if need be.
I generally export them to JPG for web use though simply because a quality 80 JPG is STILL smaller than the original PNG by quite some way.
Also means people can't nick my stuff and change the text (not easily) without asking me (in which case I'll happily email them the original PNGs).
...unfortunately, it's not a complete drop-in replacement, which is what I was going for. It's a partial solution -as are the other solutions out there- and so sites can be designed around it. But a complete drop-in replacement would need to work for all sites, regardless of design methodology.
A complete drop-in replacement would, therefore, have to handle img tags, object tags, and the background attributes on body, th, and td tags. This can be done easily enough using getElements ByTagName and then searching around, but a complete drop-in replacement would also need to work with CSS-specified background images on all tags, and that's where things really start to get hairy.
Of course PNG stands on it's merit. It is clear that it is far superiour to the gif format in important ways, anyone who understands the data that these files can represent knows this.
With richer content and full color display hardware now common, and more PNG support than ever in applications and browsers PNG will be around for a long time to come.
http://images.slashdot.org/topics/topicpatents.gif ;)
OK, GIF was passable for downloading pictures over a 9600baud modem, because you could accept 8-bit pictures for the increase in speed.
But these days--give me true colour or don't waste my time! GIF is only useful for charts and graphs which use a minimal number of colours; and even there, PNG is a comparable format.
JPG? Lossy.
How can you even bother comparing a lossless format with a lossy one, or an 8-bit ONLY format with a flexible depth one? There's no connection, no comparison, and no competition.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
PNG is great for non-web uses. I've used it as the format of choice in games and other programming projects I've had. The resulting files are smaller than raw bitmaps and just as nice looking. For such uses neither GIF or JPEG can really cut it.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
PNG is a semi-arbitrary bit depth image format which will support up to an 8 bit alpha layer.
PNG will likely continue to gain acceptance, especially when IE supports alpha'd PNGs, because they simply let you do things you cannot do in any other way, at least on the web. The other image formats with PNG's features are proprietary. GIF will continue to thrive for the purpose of doing small animations, if nothing else.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
BMF may have better compression performance than PNG, but 1. the web site is in Russian (and gives Babel Fish problems) and 2. there's no indication on the translation of the web site that the author is willing to allow reading and writing of BMF images in free software.
Will I retire or break 10K?
the scalable vector graphics format is set to replace Flash as well as PDF. It's an XML based format that is a w3c recommendation. It's very new, so now is the time to start proselytizing. Adobe ships an SVG viewer with acrobat. Mozilla has preliminary SVG support. The future looks bright.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I developed a technique for making snapshows, or animated snapshots. The idea is to take a series of digital photographs from slightly different angles and link them into an animation (sample, sample). The effect is similar to "bullet-time" -- a picture with a little bit of motion and 3-D depth.
Snapshows require a format that can store a full-color animation of just a few frames long. GIF is out since it's limited to 8-bit color, and MPEG is too complicated and lossy. MNG worked just about right. The biggest problems were that the available editors were a bit weak and buggy and the only browser with MNG support was Mozilla. I hoped that MNG would catch on in the mainstream. Sad to hear that it's falling out of even Mozilla.
AlpineR
- PNGs may be great, but nobody uses them
- PNGs never caught on because IE doesn't support them
- PNGs will never catch on until M$ supports all their features.
- I can't get PNGs to work
The fact of the matter is, PNGs work great as a drop-in replacement for GIFs. If you limit yourself to what GIFs can do, IE 4.x and Netscape 4.x can use them just fine. And those browsers have just about disappeared from old age.Of course, if you create a 24-bit PNG to compete with an 8-bit GIF, the GIF will be smaller. Otherwise the PNG will be significantly smaller. If you use gamma correction in the PNG, weird things can happen when people have their gamma misconfigured.
In my own tests a year ago, IE 5.5 on Windows and Mac, as well as Netscape 7 and Mozilla (on Windows, Mac and Linux), all browsers did just fine with 8-bit images, 24-bit images, as well as alpha transparency. That last one is really, really cool looking and everyone should try it.
My theory is that few people use PNGs because most of the HTML books out there recommend GIFs because that's what the authors learned and nobody has bothered to correct them.
More info:
the M$ avi file format which Windows Media Player treats as audio, displaying an "ambience" instead of your digicam's movie.
This means only that you have a decoder for the audio but not for the video. Install a decoder for your digicam's video format and everything will work fine.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Its been done:
http://www.mongus.net/pngInfo/
I've noticed that too - whenever I put red next to another colour the other always floods into the red, not the other way round, even pure red ends up smudged brown... Anyone know why?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
that is insane.
PNGs and GIFs are for two completely substances.
1. GIFs, are great small, low quality images(such as computer art not using more that a few colors)
PNGs are a high quality lossless replacement for jpegs if anything.
Being blind doesn't make someone a misfit or oddball.
How many blind users to you actually think out there looking for a project management tool?
The reality is not many, and certainly not enough to make worth my while diverting resources away from other (real, as opposed to hypothetical) users.
The program already outputs (and reads in) valid XML for all the data storage (project data, user accounts, permission levels, category & priority definitions) so if any one wants to add support they can, but I've already done my part.
The result of IE's lack of alpha channel support is that your app doesn't look as good, not that "it doesn't work"
Actually without transparency, it doesn't work well at all because interface elements (e.g. the tabs, GANTT view) become confusing without transparency. Unlike you I don't think malformed elements are acceptable or workable.
If a user has to spend time trying to workout how to use a tool for project management because the interface is poorly designed, or broken, that means the tool isn't working (the tool is supposed to save time by allowing you to organise how time is spent, it's not meant to be a device to use up your time).
Ultimately, the decision comes down to:
1) Delay a lot of features I was planning to add, by having (and maintaining) a second text mode only interface.
2) Delay a few features I was planning to add by re-writing the interface and making it less friendly for the existing users but simple enough that it will be useable by text mode only users.
3) Add features that I was planning to thus pleasing >99% of users (but not to anything more for blind people, people who can't read English or people who can't use mice, or other users with similarly non main stream requirements).
I think providing open sourced GLP'd software, with documented API's and XML data formats is doing enough. I choose option 3 and leave the additional features to be written by those that want to add them. I will address the issues of disabled users, mobile users and non English speakers after, and only after - I have satisfied the needs of the majority of users. It's cold, hard and practicle.
In closing I note that you wouldn't complain if I used QT or GTK for widget generation: The only reason I'm using an HTML based interface in the first place is so that it's as accessible as possible (so that users don't need to install additional client software, they simply need a relatively main stream graphical web browser, like IE, Netscape, Mozilla, Galeon, Safari or Konqueror).
Unisys does not now nor did it EVER own the GIF patent.
One underlying technology of GIF was LZW compression...that was a patented algorithm to Unisys. CompuServe used it as the compression algorithm for GIF, and fell afoul of the patent attorneys.
The webcomics in my "funnies" slashbox
A fter y2k - http://www.geekculture.com/geekycomics/Aftery2k/af tery2kmain.html
t aliarian burger - http://unquietmind.com/tburger/totalitarian122.htm l
PNG:
8-bit theatre - http://www.nuklearpower.com/
diesel sweeties - http://www.dieselsweeties.com/
kevin & kell - http://www.herdthinners.com/
GIF:
red meat - http://www.redmeat.com/redmeat/current/
dilbert - http://www.dilbert.com/
goats - http://www.goats.com/
superiosity - http://www.superosity.com/
doonesbury - http://www.doonesbury.com/ (link to MSN, coincidence?)
The 5th wave - http://www.ucomics.com/thefifthwave/index.phtml
pvp - http://www.pvponline.com/
fopxtrot - http://www.ucomics.com/foxtrot/index.phtml
mikey - http://www.mikeycomics.com/
user friendly - http://www.userfriendly.org/
sinfest - http://sinfest.net/
penny-arcade - http://www.penny-arcade.com/
JPG:
under power - http://underpower.non-essential.com/
sluggy - http://www.sluggy.com
helen - http://www.comicspage.com/helen/index.html
dr fun - http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/latest.jpg
to
Damn, this was supposed to be pro-png >:-( Something I noticed though was that 75% of the sites using gif appear to be using the same serving system, whilst the pngs and jpgs are all done custom. Anyone know any reason why?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
I can't reccommend editing your HTML in MS Word 2000, but if you do then you will see that any images pasted into the document are converted to PNG when you save.
TIM
I've got GIFs from a defunct website that were sitting on a hard drive that developed errors throughout the drive because I put it on a bus that can't handle both master and slave drives. (I was attempting to make a backup and instead corrupted the original and backup drives.) Now I have a bunch of GIF files with errors in pairs of bytes randomly distributed in the file.
Now that the patent on GIF's compression is about to expire, I can work off of open source algorithms now legally distributable without royalties, attach my error fixing routines to the error detection code, progressively display the images, and fix the errors as they are encountered. And return my code to the public.
(I would have gone to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to get error-free copies, but they don't have the images for the site available. I only managed to get what I could by browsing image directories, and AFAIK I have the only "surviving" copies.)
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
That hack is completely unacceptable, since it requires javascript. Around 13% of people have javascript switched off, and clients would scream bloody murder if they thought their pretty logos were getting screwed up for so many people.
I'll admit to thinking of "PNG" as "Patent Negating Graphic" format. Whatever technical advantages there may be have never been apparent in my use.
PNGs and GIFs occupy a narrow range of graphics that are not better handled by JPG or a structured drawing format. In fact most things I have exported as PNG were because of lack of a widely supported structured drawing format. Whether PNGs hang-on, disappear or replace GIFS is actually minor to whether the web will ever embrace a structured drawing format.
you would think that would come with M$'s own Windows Media Player.
Microsoft does not know the details of every video compression method used on the face of the earth. It is up to the inventor of the video compression method to deliver a publicly available decoder.
Will I retire or break 10K?
if Mozilla team dropped the bloated bits there'd be nothing left!
completing the thought leads to I could care less, but it would be hard for me to. And completing that other thought gives that they could give a care about their computers, but don't.
(Before anyone says that their 24b video card displays more than 256 grays, consider: grayscale is R = G = B. If you have 8 bits per channel and all three channels need to be equal to form grayscale, that's only 256.)
Well, when a gif is interlaced it is often smaller than a non-interlaced gif. The opposite is true with png -- interlace a png and the file becomes larger. So that's a difference there.
On the other hand, interlacing was created back when we were all trucking around on 9600 baud modems, to give people something to look at while waiting for the page to load. Even on a 28.8 modem, it's not needed as much these days, unless the web designer has created horribly large and unweildy graphics, in which case the lack of a gif is the least of your problems.
I simply don't interlace the pngs on my site. None of my vistors have ever complained.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
> I do believe that older, less capable formats generally always make way for the newer, better formats [...].. Win95 to WinNT to WinXP
Dude, you forgot Win(whatever) to Linux!
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
XV's been leapfrogged for most stuff -- eog works so much better for casual browsing...
GIF is to PNG as M$ is to Linux
The first is the crappier product but has all the market momentum. Despite being better/stronger/faster/cheaper and the support of a strong but fiercly loyal following, the latter suffers from (relative) obscurity.
LZW compression is the part of GIF that Unisys patented. The two are inextricably linked.
Agreed, and it is also important for us to adhere to correct spelling ;-)
(note, the the speling error in the subject is intentional ;-)
Take a look at SVG. It supports vector graphics, PNG motion/animation and sound (at least in 1.2). Looks like Flash has also been opened up so you've got quite a selection. Here are some comparisons (look a little out of date) and a resource website.
Quack, quack.
Nope, they are still using GIFs for their graphics.
I think that last one is the most ironic of the lot. And I too find it a bit hypocritical. Seems like they should at least serve PNGs to browsers that can cope with them.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
V.42bis used LZW compression too. When LZW patent expires, it will mean the death of v.44, which is patented as well.
PNG never took off because GIF never went away.
Despite all the moaning and gnashing of teeth over the GIF patent, every graphics program produced over the past 15 years, including many shareware programs, has included GIF support. The end result was that people were able to continue creating, editing and using GIF files and the average person never even noticed a problem.
To:Â the Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows Development Team
The PNG image format was designed to be a replacement for the GIF format, due to both copyright and design problems with GIF. However, the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) still does not have full and proper support for the image format, despite the fact that the whitepaper for MSIE 4, which can be read here, promised full support:
"While other browser manufactures include PNG support as a 3rd party option , Internet Explorer 4.0 provides native support for PNG."
Full native support for PNG still has not been implemented in the Windows version of MSIE, despite the fact that MSIE for Mac and others browsers have full support, and it was promised to the users of MSIE for Windows over four years ago.
We, the undersigned, request that the developers of MSIE for Windows please implement full support for PNG images, for the following reasons:
The PNG format is superior to the GIF format: When the same image is saved in both PNG and GIF formats, in an editor with full and proper support for both formats, the PNG image is typically a smaller file size, is free from royalties, patents, and copyright restrictions that hinder the GIF format, and can use more than 256 colours - up to 48-bit colour.
The PNG format is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation: Microsoft has repeatedly stated their renewed commitment to web standards, so implementing full PNG support would be the next logical step in fulfilling this promise, especially since it was supposed to be implemented over four years ago.
The PNG format supports alpha transparency: Anybody who has designed images for use online knows the woes of trying to make that image appear smooth on any background. Some designers create different images to be used on different background colours, other designers simply leave the edges jagged, and still others just give their images a solid background. It's a bad way to go, but it's the only choice right now. Using PNG images with alpha transparency would eliminate all of these problems, and make the work of web designers a lot easier.
After ignoring requests on this issue for four years, we hope that you, the developers of Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows, will take a step in the right direction, and show that you truly are committed to web standards.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned
help out.
PNG is probably the best format out there for full color images w/alpha channel. It's definitely the smallest in this mode.
You can import PNGs into Macromedia Flash and preserve the alpha channel.
What this means is, for instance, you could import an image sequence generated by a rendering package like Lightwave and when you output the Flash, you are left with the equivalent of a JPEG image sequence layer with a perfect alpha channel on the edges. Even though the JPEG introduces blocky artefacting as the compression is ramped up, it doesn't mess up the alpha blending.
There is nothing else I know of that can do something like that.
I really wish JPEG had a mode with an alpha channel but it doesn't.
Then don't use PNG. I view the platform portability of the web at a much higher rating than any file format, or any "feature" Microsoft may induce you to use. Much less, when we all know libpng is free for Microsoft to grab and integrate in MSIE. I'd feel entraped working around Microsoft bugs, again.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
Get the pr0n industry to use PNG, and it'll gain widespread acceptance.
Anyone know whether the Eudora Internet suite for PalmOS does?
Well, apparently all that would be necessary, then, is for someone to adapt one of the many popular Outlook/IE viruses to do nothing except change IE's display preferences for PNG to quicktime!
And maybe install quicktime. Although if quicktime continues to be nagware, this could easily backfire...
Tweet, tweet.
Makes sense to me. Sorry Alan dude, I don't have any mod points right now or I'd lift you a bit.
Could instead of couldn't really bugs me. But then, so does apostrophe misuse, spelling that indicates that the person lacks even basic grasp of the mechanics of their language, improper homonym usage, etc. I've just eventually come to realize that you can't help people who LIKE being stupid. They think it absolves them of responsibility.
If you need DirectX calls to render images in web pages, one of these days we'll see ourselves writing directinput calls to read Microsoft keyboards.
In a couple years, we'll be writing Direct3d calls to render windows in Windows.
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
PNG is a far better format than GIF. 32bit color, alpha transluceny (vs simply on/off transparency in gif). Not to mention that the patent on GIF is expiring in the USA but will still remain valid in some other countries.
I know. I even see ANSI graphics now and then. ;)
/. at -1. I see a lot more ANSI graphics than I care to see. Some of them are funny, however...if you have a sick, twisted, disgusting view of what's funny. There's nothing quite like an ASCII art goatse or tubgirl picture to wake you up in the morning. That and the big schlong picture that shows up as a troll from time to time.
/. Troll Archive. That would be fitting.
I read
I hope that there is a society for the preservation of trolls out there that saves this stuff. Maybe then some day, this generation's Ozmandias can be the
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
Macromedia bastardized the PNG format for Fireworks. The PNG spec does not support layers, effects, type, and vector data (but that is what Fireworks thinks). I wish they had come up with extension like .FWK or something.
It's a thought. My understanding is that SVG allows for use of multiple kinds of bitmapped formats, and when people need to make the leap to SVG, maybe they'll be willing to embrace PNG, especially if the alpha transparency support comes in.
Widely varying screen resolutions are already starting to make fixed-size image display an issue. Vector graphics are the only way out. I think SVG or something similar will have its day in a few years. Maybe PNG can catche the wave.
Tweet, tweet.
Unlike GIF, PNG supports more than 256 colors. Gone are the days 8bpp color.
certainly not enough to make worth my while diverting resources away from other (real, as opposed to hypothetical) users
Your excuse completely bypasses the fact that if you knew what you were doing, you wouldn't need to divert anything.
would be to simplify and popularize the use of mozilla. if mozilla had a d/l manager with resume, and looked identical to IE, but had all the standards compliant stuff, and tabbed browsing, and there was a installer that did all the common flash plugins etc during installation: even my retarded family would start using it.
and then everyone would switch to png eventually, cuz gif sucks monkey butt.
rhy
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Consider that inflammable and flammable mean the same thing in English. Of course, flammable probably exists because someone mistakenly thought the "in-" means "not."
One big reason is the PNG/MNG extension naming crazyness. People love using GIF both animated and static without needing to worry about the extension. There is a lot of code out there (ad serving) which assumes the extension won't need to change for animated vs static images, and this just adds one more thing to worry about. If the creators of PNG (as good as it is technically) had thought a little bit more about the end user and what would have been necessary to switch to their format (i.e. market research), they might have made things easier.
Fireworks source documents confusingly use the .png extension, but have nothing to do with the PNG (portable network graphics) format. Thankfully, I find Fireworks to have the best optimization of PNG output among the graphics apps I've used. 8-bit PNGs /always/ export smaller than their 8-bit GIF counterparts.
I know the article title is highly misleading, but the key issue here is that it is the patent on Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) compression that is expiring. The GIF format uses LZW compression. GIF is not (AFAIK) patented in anyway, just the compression algorithm.
The important thing is that this powerful compression technique will soon be in the public domain. Yes, in the public domain, not GPLed, or LGPLed, or BSDed, or any other license. It will soon be the property of every living being capable of making use of it. You will be free to use LZW in a compression utility. You will be free to distribute a library that implements LZW. You will be free to add LZW compression to PNG. Or to use it as the basis of a file system. Of, to print it on your T-shirts and toilet paper if you want to wear it or... with it.
LZW is now ours.
This is the whole point of patents by the way, the inventor gets a monopoly for a while (to damned long in most cases) so they can cover the cost of development, but then the patented item becomes public domain.
Stonewolf
PNG really can't replace JPG, which offers better compression for fast loading web photos, etc. However, PNG is a good replacement for other *losless* formats, like TIF. PNG is more efficient in terms of compression, and is a completely open standard.
A few photographers I know are using PNG now as their master, archival format, instead of TIF, or Photoshop/Paintshop native formats.
GIF has a disease-causing license that clogs the veins of commerce. PNG retains a natural license, which keeps things flowing freely, and its users living longer.
...and that's the bottom line. Gamma support is what allows an image to appear the same on all platforms. Microsoft doesn't want this. Otherwise, they would probably have had good PNG support years ago.
It's either that, or don't use PNG.
Wrong. It's either the DirectDraw hack, or don't use alpha-transparent PNG. Since IE 4, binary transparency in indexed images has worked for PNG just as well as for GIF.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I know people who don't use a graphical interface, for example. I'm not going to spend time pleasing them when I could be adding new features that would improve the lot of >95% of other users.
Even when you are barred from getting a contract with the U.S. government because you are not compliant with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Actually TIFF is a larger challenge, as TIFF now can be compressed at no cost. At work I used TIFF's to exchange with the layout folks, but switched to PNG and am convincing people left and right to do the same. When you reduce a 7 MB TIFF to an 80 KB PNG with no loss of quality, it's pretty convincing.
BTW, I'm not using it for WWW purposes, we do traditional magazine publishing.
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
Actually without transparency, it doesn't work well at all because interface elements (e.g. the tabs, GANTT view) become confusing without transparency.
Do they work without semi-transparency? Microsoft Internet Explorer has correctly handled binary transparency in indexed PNG images since at least version 4.
I will address the issues of disabled users, mobile users and non English speakers after, and only after - I have satisfied the needs of the majority of users.
Working accessibility and internationalization into your design at early stages is easier than working them in at later stages. It appears that by publicly defining your API and data stream format, you have taken some steps toward this goal. Now all you need to do is get somebody else to implement an alternate interface (like your option 1, but without the delay).
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is a myth. Admittedly, it is a myth with some partial truth, but it is nevertheless a myth.
The images at http://phil.ipal.org/tc.html demonstrate how a GIF file can contain more than 256 colors. Ironically, mozilla's libpr0n is broken on multi-block GIF files, so mozilla does not display the true-color GIF correctly.
While designing my site, I opted to use png because of it's alpha transparency function. Internet Exlorer for Windows does not support alpha blending in png without using scripts and an active x plug-in. I have had to write php scripts that generate all my image tags instead of using normal tags, just so that IE can display my blended graphics. It is somewhat of a pain in the ass because of MicroSofts weak support for PNG. Maybe after the gif patent expires they will finally add decent png support, but they have been saying that for years.
SproutWorks Software Design
don't even mention GIF. PNG rules for bitmaps storage... really, the only reason for something better is for graphics programs to have native formats that store things like selection areas, etc., e.g. Photoshop or GIMP formats. PNG!
btw, libpng, also, rules.
Anonymous so you can send the karma from this very insightful post straight to png.
http://entropymine.com/jason/testbed/alphagamma/ .png file for people to diagnose their monitor gamma. Mozilla, and Opera rendered it correctly, with the same pixel values as the program that I created it with. But Internet explorer showed it too dark. It darkens truecolor .png's, but it works fine with indexed-color .png's.
See the section for test result for Internet Explorer for Windows?
Test number 6 (Reference PNG) has a different gamma than Test 7 (Reference Gif), even when the test doesn't specify a gamma.
Internet Explorer does mess up the gamma, for no possible reason when it isn't necessary. Ugh.
I first became aware of Internet Explorer's gamma-change-for-no-reason when I made a
You can find a reference to this gamma mistake on this page.
http://www.graphicswiz.com/png/colorcube/
yes, they will survive. they are more efficient to edit than gifs, and when you have a program like macromedia fireworks, you can see the quality/size ratio is better as well.
I could care less, but it's not worth the effort.
What a bizzare statement...
You comment completely bypasses the idea of time (as viewed by us mere mortals) as a linear construct.
If I'm doing (a) how can I possibly do (b) at the same time? My time is obviously a finite resource.
I'm either going to be adding new features OR adding an additional interface support for the blind. Even with the API hooks for rendering widgets (which are mostly present, explicity for text and low bandwidth users) I would still need to do the work at some point.
It's not as if they fairies are going to do it (as my mother was fond of saying when I was child).
Do they work without semi-transparency? Microsoft Internet Explorer has correctly handled binary transparency in indexed PNG images since at least version 4.
My project only uses basic (binary) transparency. Having not tried it under IE recently (just tested it just now) it does actually now work fine without the Direct X hack, which was the only way I could get it to work before.
I was having some issues with libpng before (on a Solaris system), I assume it was screwing up the transparencies in some way.
Now, it looks fine (so yay!).
(Actually, the above isn't strictly true as I do use multiple layers of transparency, but that's just for addtional easy of use so that users can see what's behind an item when they are dragging it, which is useful in complex views).
Working accessibility and internationalization into your design at early stages is easier than working them in at later stages.
Been there before, I've had to deal with encoding for not just European languages, but Russian and Japanese before, and I'm constantly switching between platforms (Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows). I've also developed for multiple device profiles at once, which is one of the reasons behind the idea of having libraries to render HTML.
all you need to do is get somebody else to implement an alternate interface
I'm still working on that, I have to add a handful of additional features before it will start to interest people, then I will be able to go back over things I've deliberately skipped over and lay some more ground work for future development.
One think I think a few other people are missing out is that I'm making a deliberate approach, from experience, on finding a balance between ground work and getting a usable product out.
I've done what I consider to be the important ground work (DB interface, IO, file locking, etc), and have skipped over a few things like not using SQL as the language for data extraction (or even having a formal API for data extraction).
If I did all the ground work first, I'd have nothing to show for months, as I know from experience, and I've never wanted that. I'd rather build a useful application (i.e. solid IO, good error handling, humane interface) and go back and re-write parts later (e.g. re-write procedural functions as OO functions). Once you get over a hurdle (where you have a usable but basic product) it's easy to go back, tidy a few loose ends and work in a completely structured fashion from then on, because there is much more momentum behind the product.
Also think it's a bit futile to set things in stone at the begining and write API's before you need them because they invariably need changing anyway (though obviously this is not a sensible idea for a really _large_ multiuser project where there is no central dictator).
sleightplus demonstrates how to overcome IE's rendering bugs without polluting your markup or styles; no silly style inlining required, either. Use PNG images or backgrounds all the way they were intended.
Predecessors with only support for foreground images: Youngpup sleight, WebFX PNG behavior, mongus pngInfo, Bob Osola. PNGHack, a server side solution, is doomed to fail because of dysfunctional browser sniffing.
If that was useful for you, and you are a C hacker, I have a plea. Take the dlquant sourcecode (see above) and massage it so it works with PNG instead of the archaic PPM. I want a functional Bright clone for Linux that takes a true colour PNG and outputs a paletted PNG. Can you do that?
<daxim@gmx.de>Import a PNG and GIF into flash and you'll immediately notice the superiority of the PNG.
I want to know what's your favorite tool to produce PNG files.
I also want to know if there's a comparison chart, comparison different tools that produce PNG files, see which one does the best color, and which one does the best in compactness, etc.
Any recommendation ?
Thank you.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I believe we can all agree that gif is an inferior format, even compared to tiff. LZW, however, is an extremely good compression algorithm. I would imagine the zlib maintainers could find many uses for it, especially considering the way they can optimize generally inferior algorithms like Huffman, RLE and LZ77. I think, in any case, that zlib was designed for this sort of growth.
[insert witty comment here]
My hope would be that at this point PNG can stand on its own technical merits, rather then on ideological merits.
I just don't understand some people. There is such a thing called values, and sometimes it is important to uphold values even if that means to bear any personal inconviniences.
That is not the case with PNG, but I just wanted to make this point.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Heh, stating the obvious is now trolling. That troll moderator has obviously never developed web sites or looked at how many PNGs are in circulation today. GIFs are a defacto standard in web design. PNG has always languished in obscurity.
Parent node contains ASCII art of the famous goatse.cx picture. Probably not work safe for most people... =)
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
the scalable vector graphics format is set to replace Flash as well as PDF.
How does SVG support animation? Is it through the DOM? And how can a vector graphics format support synchronized sound?
Will I retire or break 10K?
banner ads that are animated always get better CTR than the same banner not animated
Relevant text ads reportedly get even more clicks than animated graphics because they look more like content and thus (for now) do not trigger "banner blindness" in readers.
Will I retire or break 10K?
By not using PNGs you are entraping yourself by working around Microsoft bugs, again. Using PNG should be the correct approach to platform portability. It would certainly be much easier to locate and update a CSS file than convert to PNG later. The latter would never really be an option. In this case, the CSS hack isn't really that intrusive. Alternatively, you could just stick with binary transparency in the PNG (just like GIF, but with better colour depth, etc), but again you're limiting yourself based on MSFT bugs.
The PNG spec does not support layers, effects, type, and vector data (but that is what Fireworks thinks).
Fireworks thinks this just up until you Export... the images.
I wish they had come up with extension like .FWK or something.
That is, unless .fwk is already in use. There are only about 17,000 three-letter strings, and the FAT file system of Windows 9x cannot always be depended on to store file name extensions longer than three letters.
Will I retire or break 10K?
AVI is a M$ format. Why M$ would shit on it is beyond me.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Even Mozilla, the only browser which ever supported MNG, has removed it.
Mozilla removed MNG support from the trunk because it lacked a maintainer. According to bug 18574 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18574 ), Glenn Randers-Pehrson is willing to maintain Mozilla's MNG support.
Combine this with the fact that JPEG (the current de facto standard for wallpapers) has an inexplicable and yet undeniable hatred for the color red
The problem with red is that your quality setting is set too low. JPEG has three channels (Y lightness, Cr red chroma, Cb blue chroma), and it stores most of the red information in the Cr channel. Tell your encoder to allocate more bits to Cr, and JPEG will handle red better. (No, I don't specifically know how to do this with the IJG JPEG code. It has something to do with custom -qtables and -qslots, but I don't know from there.) If the problem is that red-black or red-green edges seem to be made of 2x2 pixel blocks, you're seeing the effect of the default 2:1 chroma downsampling, which can be disabled (at the cost of increased file size) in most encoders. (In IJG's cjpeg, use -sample 2x2,2x2,2x1 for more red resolution or -sample 2x2,2x1,1x1 for more blue resolution and a lot more red resolution.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
or -sample 2x2,2x1,1x1 for more blue resolution and a lot more red resolution.
Correction: This should have been
Will I retire or break 10K?
Xanim seems to do it, and I doubt what you say is true. If it is true, it's so Microsoft! It's kind of like their registry. They created the damn thing, but did not specify what vendors put into it, yet they require it to be perfect for their goofey OS to boot your computer. Looked at that way, I don't expect Microsoft to provide anything, even if it's their own file format and others can make full decoders for it and others in less than 100k of binary. Nope, it don't fit on the disk, especially when you have that disk filled with 10,000 "drivers" for 5 chipsets.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Xanim seems to [include every AVI codec]
Can the complete Xanim distribution be distributed in the United States without infringing a patent?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I've managed to verify that this works in Mac IE 5.0, but I can't seem to get it to work in either version of MSIE for Windows that I have access to at work (5.0 on Win98 or 6.0 on XP Home). Am I doing something wrong? Here's where I'm trying...
my test page screenshot from IE5 on Windows screenshot from IE5 on Mac screenshot from geckoLike I said, IE6 on XP Home seems to do the same thing as IE5 on Win98, namely, ignore the hack. Does it work only in 5.5 and on the Mac, or am I applying it incorrectly?
There are also some layout issues with Mac IE 5, but I'll break those down into testcases separately another time. Right now I'm mainly interested in the PNG transparency.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.