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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!
You can't get rid of a graphics file format once it's out there.
Just because PNG is 'better' than GIF, doesn't mean it'll win.
GIF has such a huge head start...
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.
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.
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.
"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
Except of course animations, PNG will never do that. Plus IE won't display PNGs correctly, for some stupid reason or other.
large file size versus GIF or JPEG? Hardly. Take a 24 bit RGB image as your source, and find the format that provides the best reproduction of the original image in the least amount of space. PNG wins hands down. GIF can't reproduce the colour depth, JPEG can't reproduce the original pixels reliably without balloning the file size way beyond the PNG.
PNG is actually about the best lossless image format out there - better compression than TIFF LZW, and just as flexible.
The stupid reason is IE. Microsoft has never implemented proper PNG support.
It's not poor standardization. It's Microsoft not supporting 100% of the standard. PNG is standardized just fine, thanks.
Heute die Welt, morgen das Sonnensystem!
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."
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.
Well, then you just use MNG if you need animation. And if you read the linked page, MNG is superior to animated GIFs in a number of ways, one of which is better compression. Another advantage to MNG is it's not necessarily tied to one image format. The individual images can be stored in either PNG or JPEG format.
Personally, I think it's a good thing to have several image formats available with wide support in all browsers. The reason for this is it allows developers to choose which format provides the best results for what they're doing. This means which ones look better and compress better for a certain image. It's definitely a good thing that the patent on GIF is expiring, but it's also a good thing to make sure that PNG doesn't go away, either.
So people kept on using GIF's. And very few people used PNG. There is a popular saying "Its not what its worth, its how it is marketed"
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
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
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
16,777,216 = 256 * 256 * 256.
Your calculation:
GIF : 256 colors
PNG: 256 * 256 * 256 * 256 (r * g * b * a).
PNG/GIF = 256 ** 3 = 16,777,216.
In fact, PNG supports
65536 * 65536 * 65536 * 65536.
So, using your line of thought,
PNG / GIF = 256 ** 7 = 72,057,594,037,927,936.
Unfortunately, in this world, Microsoft IS the standard. Their unstandard formats usually end up replacing whatever standards were there before...
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/
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?
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.
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.
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?
This decision is what hurt PNG significantly. As we see, there was no migration of animated imaging on the web from GIF to MNG. One reason is there was simply no browser support. And why did PNG take so long to get into browsers? It was developed quick enough, but it should have been in every browser version thereafter. It was not. It took a while before support started to show up. And then, there was no animation. So everyone who wanted to put animated images up had to stay with GIF. I think the PNG folks created a fine piece of technology and failed to promote it properly. And it should have had at least basic animation at a level equivalent to GIF for no other reason than to kill off GIF. But they didn't do that and decide to drag things out, and so GIF did not die.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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?
Agreed, it seems highly unusual, if not hypocritical, to "hope that png succeeds" against the gif format and yet use the .gif graphic format on ones own site.
Taco, Hemos, etc, the PNG format won't succeed if people don't USE it. If it is truly and honestly your intention to support the PNG format over the gif format, then put your graphics where your mouth is. In the interim, your well wishes might be in the right place, but will do little or no good in the absence of action.
-Matt
- 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:
I find it highly ironic that slashdot is such a "pro-OSS" and "anti-patent" site, yet they use GIF instead of PNG images. Talk about hypocritical.
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.
You know what's really funny? Microsoft Frontpage (some version, before I started using Linux) came bundled with some Microsoft Image Creator program. That program had support PNGs with transparencies. Talk about Microsoft's left hand not knowing what its right hand is doing.
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.
You can't have it both ways. Either it's in the public domain or you retain your copyright. Pick one.
Have you ever heard of BMF?
Nope. And considering that all I can find on the web is a DOS executable, I'd consider it pretty much worthless.
The mistaken belief that GIF has a limit of 256 colors probably comes from the way GIF was first used when it came out.
Err, I would say this belief comes from someplace else, like... the GIF specification. GIF has been designed for 256 colors, as the Global Color Table and Local Color Table (which are made a of power-of-two number of entries limited to 256) clearly show.
The site you mention is the homepage for a hack. Yes, a clever dude can create GIFs that look like they have more than 256 colors... but the fact is, such a GIF is made of many 256-colors images. Totally inefficient, compared to PNG, as the author of the hack admits, at the bottom of his page.
That said, there's another well-known GIF hack, which also uses several images per GIF: animated GIF. Let's not forget that, as the spec says, The Graphics Interchange Format is not intended as a platform for animation, even though it can be done in a limited way.
So, let's hope the nightmare doesn't come true, and that horrible multi-image true-color true-Bad GIFs begin to be popular.
PNG is better than GIF in every technical aspect.
GIF Spec: here