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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.
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
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.
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!
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
(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.)