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What Is The Future of PNG?

Posted by Hemos on from the life-of-its-own dept.

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.

8 of 609 comments (clear)

  1. PNG is so much better by ClubStew · · Score: -1, Redundant

    First, wow, is this first post?

    PNG also supports larger pixel depths and alpha channels? How will the death of PNG void the existence of GIF?

  2. Not likely by Psiren · · Score: 0, Redundant

    GIF's drawbacks are well known, and are not limited to the patent. For example, 256 colour palletes are very restrictive especially now virtually everyone has high colour displays. PNG isn't going anywhere, I use it for all my images and I'm very pleased with the results. If IE's support was a bit better things would be perfect.

  3. GIF Patent by Flabby+Boohoo · · Score: 0, Redundant

    It appears that the patent covering the LZW compression technology is about to expire... LZW is the compression used in GIFs.

  4. PNG vs GIF by execom · · Score: 1, Redundant

    PNG is good for large pictures, but GIF has animated format (GIF89). PNG doesn't have this feature.
    Also, IE still doesn't support correctly PNG
    And GIF compression is generally better for 16 colors picture (icon and small images) than PNG.
    I think that the two formats are just complementary.

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    I need a Sino-Logic 16. Sogo-7 data-gloves, a GPL stealth module...
  5. Re:On the other hand... by cscx · · Score: -1, Redundant

    MSIE will begin to die out soon

    Are you willing to put money on that statement?

  6. Animated PNGs? by Rik+Sweeney · · Score: 2, Redundant

    Does such a thing exist? Will it ever exist?

    The way I see it, if I have an image and it's only 8 bit I'll use a GIF, otherwise I'll use a JPG, unless it contains text that needs to be readable in which case I'll use PNG.

    Simple rule of thumb?

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  7. Re:ought to be enough by RiverTonic · · Score: -1, Redundant

    640k of main memory is also ought to be enough by some people. :-)

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    This is RiverTonic's sig.
  8. gif pr0n by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    I remember seeing some nice gif p0rn on my 286.
    Everybuddy did it!
    Thats why gifs are so famous.