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.

Comments

Re:here's hoping.

[SirPrize]

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. :-(

It's all about consumers.

[Vandil X]

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.

Re:PNGs

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Slashdot

[Mr_Silver]

Maybe the answer to whether it will fail or not lies in possibly the largest geek site on the web?

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.