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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.
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.
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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
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?
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.
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There is an animated version of PNG as well; check the web site.
Worse yet, you can't just wait for IE to support it, you have to wait for the versions of IE used by everyone you want to visit your web pages to support it. If you want to support the oldest browsers (I don't, but some folks do), you'll never be able to use PNGs.
As an aside, many have pointed out that comparing PNGs to GIFs doesn't make a lot of technical sense. But it makes a lot of practical sense to anyone who has a web site. If you want to put up some images, you have limited choices. There are no options that are lossless, unencumbered, compressed, and supported by both old and new browsers. Depending on which of those you're willing to cave on, you may choose PNGs, GIFs, or JPEGs.
I was wondering about this just two or three weeks ago, and tested with Mozilla and IE 6. Both of them can display PNG files, but it's only Mozilla that could render the 256-level alpha channel properly. Made for some very neat effects. IE didn't manage the transparency at all. :-(
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
I don't know about other browsers, but MNG support has been dropped from Mozilla in recent builds. Apparently the MNG library was quite large (apparently just a few hundred k, though...), and rarely-used, so it was dropped as part of a bloat-reduction effort. Can't say I agree with them. More discussion can be found over at the mozillazine.org forums.
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As for IE not working, that's IE's fault and if we pussyfoot around a sucky implementation, we'll be stuck with substandard images. If we use enough PNGs on web sites and tell people that any rendering problem is IE's fault we'll hopefully either (a) encourage the use of non-IE browsers (e.g. Opera or Mozilla) or (b) force MS to fix IE.
If only GIF support were this bad in major browsers! We could get rid of that accursed animated GIF altogether. Animated GIFs have no purpose in browsers except banner ads. Anything legitimate could be done better with mpeg.
Out of interest, what the hell sort of software are your idiot coworkers using if they can't load a simple PNG? I can't understand this; every time someone mentions PNG, people always complain that they nobody has heard of it and no application can handle it. What? I use PNG for everything I do. I've never had a problem saving or loading it, unless for some bizare reason I'm using ancient Windows applications that can only handle BMP, TIFF and PCX of all things. I really don't get it!
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.
AFAIK, the PNG format itself allows up to 65536 levels of transparency. It can use 16 bits (65536 levels) for red, 16 bits for green, 16 bits for blue and 16 bits for alpha. But most images use only 8 bits (256 levels) for each channel.
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).
Unfortunately even half my coworkers don't know what a PNG is.
This shows my age, but the original use of PNG was persona non grata . Usually that refers to diplomats that have been caught spying, and expelled from the host country (not allowed to arrest the diplomats).
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.
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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.
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
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 !
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.
(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.)
V.42bis used LZW compression too. When LZW patent expires, it will mean the death of v.44, which is patented as well.