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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.
Because everyone wants 256 color GIFs.
PNG does everything GIF does, only a million times better.
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
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
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.
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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.
Apple's Quicktime can become the default plug in for PNGs and display them instead of IE within IE. Therefore full advantage can be made of Alpha channels. Obviously not everyone has QuickTime installed.
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This is such a sore point for me. To me the main raison d'etre for PNG's is that alpha transparency instead of the single-bit transparency that GIF's offer.
However, IE for Windows supports it *horribly*. If you want to use the alpha transparency feature of PNG's, you've got to jump through a lot of crappy, nonsensical IE-only hoops.
Here is a rather funny page (since the author's disbelief and anger at IE's horrible behavior is palpable) which does a good job of explaining the issue, and supplying a few workarounds.
It's a shame that IE is so crappy in this regard (and plenty of others, but that's another discussion)... there's no good reason for it. Apparently IE for Mac supports them just fine, btw... so it's not like Microsoft has some official PNG-hating policy, they just simply got sloppy with IE/Win. Another good example why too much share in a given market (in this case, web browsers for Windows) is a bad thing for competition. Why should they bother improving or fixing IE/Win? What's in it for them?
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... 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.
Not really. Some encoders are pretty poor, but an 8 bit PNG can easily rival, if not beat it's gif counterpart.
Let's pick a quick example:The
If you think this is too simple an image, let's try a screengrab of my desktop, reduced to 256 colours. Feeling lucky?Same deal as above. The original is a 24bit pngcrushed file. None were saved as interlaced/progressive, nor with any transparency.
I dunno about you, but PNG looks pretty good to me.
Remember that most PNG's are likely to be 24 bits, as opposed to GIF's maximum of 8, and can even include an extra 8 bits of alpha transparency.
What? There's at least one free high quality reference implementation anyone's welcome to use (even Microsoft), the full specification's there for anyone to read, there's a W3C recommendation that's actively maintained. What more standardization do you need?
Yes, IE doesn't support alpha transparency (something GIF doesn't even have the potential to do; PNG's 8 bit alpha channel is as big as GIF's entire range!), but for general use PNG's a perfect replacement for GIF.
JPEG can beat both, but only if you don't mind it dropping image quality to do so; not something you want to do generally.
So what? Most users can just double click on the image file (who's file extension Windows helpfully hides by default) and won't notice the difference. And if some so called "web developer" hasn't heard of it, well, sucks to be him and his clients.
IE 6, at least on NT-based systems, even screws up the palettes on PNGs.
I can save a graphic using RGB 102,0,0 and I would have to change it to RGB 115,0,0 or something similar to match the background color attribute of the HTML page.
IE is horrendous on PNG graphics, still to this day.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
Yeah, and IE6 has the exact same support. PNG, no alpha transparency. The single most-used browser in the world is the only one lacking the most attractive feature of PNG files. Even IE5 on the MAC has alpha support.
If PNG fails, I think that the blame for that falls squarely in Microsoft's lap.
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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.)
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