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GIF Slips Away From Unisys; Your Move, IBM
Twenty years ago, Terry Welch's improvement on Lempel-Ziv compression appeared in IEEE Computer magazine. The authors of unix 'compress' and the GIF standard incorporated that algorithm without realizing it was patent-pending. When the submarine patent surfaced ten years later, its new owner Unisys intimidated developers and web authors into moving away from GIFs, inspiring the creation of a better standard, though sadly still a less popular one. Today, July 7, 2004, Unisys's last LZW patent (in Canada) expires, leaving GIF once again free... almost. See, there's the small matter of IBM's patent, granted on the same algorithm, which is valid for another two years. That still has a chilling effect on GIF development, though the consensus seems to be that IBM would lose any court action it tried to bring. So how about it, IBM? You've got nothing to lose! Want to make a lot of geeks happy and release that final patent into the public domain?
Do it for the common good. Aside from business, really what open source is for!
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
and png truly is a better standard why should geeks care what happens to gif?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I am sure IBM have better things to fight over than one of many image file formats, especially when JPG and PNG, and TIF are probably more useful now.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
They should enforce the patent and only license it to products who would implement PNG (correctly) as well as GIF. ;)
I'm not sure on the merits of the GIF format after all these years, the only thing it brings to the web expierence is flashing adverts, PNG provides full alpha-transparency which is really required for the future of web design.
Having one of the most commonly used compression algorithms in the public domain is going to be a huge boon for me as a student because it'll allow me to finally see how commonly LHZ is implimented and let me study compression.
Anyone happen to have a copy of the alg. lying around?
"Curiouser and Curiouser" - Alice
Go on IBM GIFt it to us.
Omnis amans amens
I'm sure this will be a godsend for all the pr0n website owners out there. They were probably looking for a better way to show there "free trials" on their sites.
What would be the benefit of giving up the patent? We've already got .png, right?
What would be more interesting is suing someone over it. This patent "cold war" is annoying - it would be more beneficial to see an all-out war where large companies crumble, and the idiocy of software patents is demonstrated once and for all. Cold war only server to suffocate, and masses never learn of the damage being done, because it's so invisible.
Interesting article on how IP law conflicts with ancient chinese tradition is here
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
PNG files are not a better format. The folks that created it shot themselves in the foot by ignoring the primary reason to use a GIF file. Animation.
You can't make animations with PNG files....
In the 1980's I'm pretty sure that IBM would fight tooth and nail for any patent infringement. But those were the days when IBM was the 800 pound gorilla and what Microsoft wanted to be (and eventually became).
Nowadays IBM is on the rebound, and wants to put forth a kinder and gentler face. In as such, along with the almost impossible task of enforcing a practically public domain standard, it would be politically correct for them to just look the other way on GIFs.
Shouldn't you be able to look the algorithm up in the patent itself? That's what patents were for, weren't they? A patent is open, so everybody can learn from it, but making money of it is limited to the patent holder. And after a patent expires, the invention is in the public domain, so everybody can use it.
Real link is here
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Unless the IBM patent introduces something new (but I couldn't see anything like that in the first claim) and you were actually using it then, assuming the expired patent was filed before the IBM patent, the former should constitute (public) prior art. You should be able to use it without concerns .
Of course, the lawyer types might still want to argue the case since that's how that make their money
You're talking about an obsolete technology [GIF] that nobody cares about.
I'd question that. Check Google images and see how many web sites still exclusively use .gifs. Not to mention a certain main-stream browser whose support for .pngs is still patchy.
I guess you and I have different definitions of "obsolete".
This is where the serious fun begins.
IBM has shitloads of patents for all kinds of stuff, but it doesn't enforce them except to defend themselves. Thus this isn't a concern for OSS. Also I bet there are dozens of more relevant patents people should be asking them to release...
We are done with GIFs long ago and moved on to PNG and MNG
Give
It
Free
If Slashdot thinks it's a geek haven then it should act like one by using open standards. Then again, looking at the quality of the HTML on this site it's pretty obvious that the use of GIFs are the result of laziness.
Hey, LZW isn't the only compression scheme out there.
Beware of Geeks bearing GIF's
If they release the GIF patent to the public, they can spend their time doing other things, like fighting off the SCO army of lawyers.
... on their website or in any of their products (sic)?
(Same goes for the rest of the "Canopy Group")
If so, then IBM should beat them over the head with their patent!
For all the chest thumping that has gone on on slashdot about the gif patent it never made sense to me why they never replaced their gifs. How hard would it have been to have a page with gifs and a page with pngs and then switched between them based on user agent string? I think all the arguments that were made would have had much more weight if they would have put their money where their mouth is.
In Republican America phones tap you.
From the compression FAQ at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/compression-faq/part1/sec tion-7.html
IBM holds many patents on arithmetic coding (4,122,440 4,286,256 4,295,125
4,463,342 4,467,317 4,633,490 4,652,856 4,792,954 4,891,643 4,901,363
4,905,297 4,933,883 4,935,882 5,045,852 5,099,440 5,142,283 5,210,536
5,414,423 5,546,080). It has patented in particular the Q-coder
implementation of arithmetic coding. The JBIG standard, and the arithmetic
coding option of the JPEG standard requires use of the patented algorithm.
No JPEG-compatible method is possible without infringing the patent, because
what IBM actually claims rights to is the underlying probability model (the
heart of an arithmetic coder).
Actually, the PNG folks do have an animation standard: MNG. In fact, it's in many ways superior, because it can support lossless or lossy compression (JNG).
Unfortunately, by making it an optional part of the standard, they ensured that browsers wouldn't support it. Even Mozilla doesn't support it anymore.
Indeed, the web would be much more beautiful if IE supported alpha transparency in PNGs.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I guess you and I have different definitions of "obsolete".
Probably. For instance, I'm of the opinion that MS-DOS is obsolete, notwithstanding the fact that there are MILLIONS of installations running it today. (yes, CP/M is obsolete too)
Internet Explorer still fails to correctly support PNG's superior transparency capabilities. Otherwise I would have adopted it much sooner in my web development. Can't run round incorporating standards into your websites that the browser that holds 95% market dominance does not support.
</TokenMicroSuckJab>
$ whatis themeaningoflife
themeaningoflife: not found
Yeah, I know there are deflated TIFFs, but they can be like "wha...?" in the prepress world.
All I want to know is how will this effect my collection of mid-90s era pr0n?
-m
#
# Modus Ponens
#
IE's support for PNGs only lacks in features that GIFs don't support anyway, so there's no disadvantage to using PNG over GIF from that front.
A comon sense question does not require 10 similar responses.
When done, mod this post to offtopic.
Why yes, nothing to lose. Which is exactly why you're practically begging them.
... though the consensus seems to be that IBM would lose any court action it tried to bring.
No offense jamie, but you should really refrain from making things up like this. There is no one anywhere with any sort of legal background that would agree with this. Hell, it's probably libel to say that. It most assuredly is an outright lie.
If IBM releases it, then that's great, but don't try to badger them into it.
Is there a reason that the writer of this topic chose to talk about the implications about having GIF open to the public rather than talk about having LZW open?
I personally think having LZW is of much more significance than GIF.
"Curiouser and Curiouser" - Alice
so there's no disadvantage to using PNG over GIF from that front.
Good point - that rarely occurs to me, for some reason. Another poster made the point that .pngs also don't support animation, which I suppose is a valid point - I tend to think that that's a good thing, but there you go...
This is where the serious fun begins.
Whatever would we do without animated gifs? Incidentally, you can use MNG for animated PNGs.
It supports PNG enough as to substitute GIF in any case.
Your comment makes no sense in this context.
IE doesn't support alpha transparency in PNGs, and that's substandard on their part, but I don't think the web would change much if it did unless everybody started bloating their sites with transparent effects where it is not needed.
I'm sure microsoft will make some retarded image format that nothing but IE can read, and the whole windows community will think it's oh so leet. damn the majority!!! .mif (Microsoft Image Format)
--------- let's go steal some lunchboxes!
For instance, I'm of the opinion that MS-DOS is obsolete, notwithstanding the fact that there are MILLIONS of installations running
Fair point. Unfortunately, I'm not in a position where I can ignore technologies that are still widely used. While clients want animated .gifs, I (or a colleague) will be happily making animated .gifs (and feeling dirty...)
This is where the serious fun begins.
IBM does enforce its patents on any company they think can pay. The did it to my company and to other companies that I know of.
Stop spreading the lie that IBM only "defends" itself using patents.
I really doubt IBM is going to go after anybody.
Unisys was collecting money on GIF licenses for years, if IBM wanted to capitalize on this, they would've sued Unisys back then.
Besides that, there is good reason: It is, by all accounts I've read, the same algorithm.
The Unisys LZW patent had even been granted before the IBM patent had been applied. It had priority by a mile. The IBM patent is simply worthless.
Developers shouldn't concern themselves with bogus patents. I for one have written programs which save GIF files, and although I respect(ed) the Unisys patent, I'm not at all worried about the IBM one.
If you mean GIFs are larger than JPEGs, that would be the difference between lossy and loss-less files. A file reproducing every bit would almost always be larger than one producing 9x9 sample areas (just an example, the sample area depends on the quality of the JPEG)
Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.
Actually that patent is being used in IBM's (second amended) counterclaims in the SCO v IBM case.
JeR
IBM is accusing SCO to infringe on three
of its patents. IIRC, one of them deals
with the LZW algorithm. So let IBM kills
SCO first...
More information on http://www.groklaw.net
"Choosey Moms Choose GIF"
That was a great site - too bad they never updated it...
--RJ
> They should enforce the patent and only license it to products who would implement PNG (correctly) as well as GIF. ;)
I fully agree. To avoid the charges, Billy Goat Gates would finally spring into action and provide us with PNG support in IE.
Standards folks... that's what this funny thing we call the net is really all about.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
...MNG code is not very good to begin with, I believe MNG support was ditched from Mozilla as well, which makes it supported in approximately 0% of the web browsers out there.
I use PNG quite a bit, but mainly as a competitor to TIF files, but I do prefer to use PNG over GIF in websites too. However, I'm only using non-transparent, plain PNGs for maximum compatibility.
Animated GIFs? Oh, right. I turned those off, along with pop-ups. If I wanted that, I'd actually use flash or something like that. I figure either you don't block stuff (which means GIF + flash) or you block stuff, in which case you don't see either. Either way, I don't see much room for GIF files...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
...still download pr0n in .gif format anymore?? What other use is there for .gifs?
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Stupid admins STILL haven't fixed the overlapping problem in Mozilla/Firefox
Have you tried a recent nightly build, where bug 217527 is RESOLVED FIXED? Or are you on a Mac and seeing bug 206120?
So, since IANAL, am I understanding that GIF is a format that we can use now freely without legal action? Can anyone conjecture why no litigation was ever put in motion regarding their ownership of the patent, especially in the "dot-com" times?
I just said the change wouldn't be massive unless people abused it. Try reading whole sentences.
Uh huh... You mean things like letting that SCO thing drag of for well over a year while the FUD continues to spread and grow?
Face it: Other companies the size of SCO have attacked IBM on more solid grounds and faced utter destruction as IBM gently farted upon them.
Meanwhile the 2.4/2.6 kernal will forever have the stigma attached that it just may... juuuuust may... contain that fabled AIX intellectual property that SCO is claiming. And if it does, we can thank IBM for that too.
Oh yeah... They've done enough for Linux.
only license it to products who would implement PNG (correctly) as well as GIF
Such a patent license would not be compatible with the GNU General Public License and thus would not apply to many free software projects.
And how would a program explicitly designed to generate GIF animations for use by web browsers implement PNG correctly? At last count, no popular web browser can display MNG animations.
...if IBM released the patent. It would be a good PR move. If they want to play ball with the open source community, this is the sort of empty gesture that might garner them a little extra geeklove.
Just use Sleight to make PNG transparency work with IE on your site.
Sure if the raw bmp or whatever raw uncompressed format you prefer was less than 256 colors it's lossless, but 257 on up and it's lossy, just to varying degrees.
Turn on Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, or any other cable channel showing a flat-shaded image. Press the still button on your DVR or your Samsung TV. How many colors do you see?
Why should anybody care about GIFs? The alternatives are out there. Just use them.
aswell as the missing alpha support that everybody's whinging about - IE shifts the PNG palette 1 shade brighter (or is it darker) so you can never accurately match up the edge of an image with page colours (specified using HTML colour codes).
you can make it look good in IE (by compensating) or good in other browsers (by doing it properly) but not good in both.
this bug's existed ever since PNG support was added, ms have no intention of fixing it.
A while ago a told a colleague that PNG was the best format for loss-less graphics (not photos) and we should use PNG for an application.
After all that the textbook line.
But then he sent me a JPEG with the quality turn to max and it looked perfect and was way smaller than PNG. Do the textbooks have it all wrong?
If the PNG format is so much better, then why does Slashdot continue to use GIF images? I know this is trolling, but one would think a forum such as Slashdot would bestow the same ideals in its operation as it does in the stories it carries.
"Want to make a lot of geeks happy and release that final patent into the public domain?"
*LOL*
Somehow I don't think what about the geeks carries as much weight as:
"What about the children?"
Cheers,
--The Dude
So people know what an "alpha-transparency is" -- it's this very beautiful flower... which is also on this page, unless you're using IE, in which case it's just blank. Some examples are also available here. Basically it's just a much nicer version of GIF's transparency.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
I bet you have some URLs to prove your claim, AC troll.
Just make the software decode GIFs and replace them with PNGs. The user doesn't notice anything except that
It was a big breakthrough when algorithms like LZW, which compressed data that contained repeated multi-byte patterns (like text, or bitmap drawings), were developed. The previous state of the art was to pre-analyze the data and build a table that would have to be exchanged before the data could be decompressed (like Huffman encoding). LZW lets you built the table on-the-fly as the data is compressed, and exchange it on-the-fly as its being decoded (because the compression "table" and the data stream are actually the same.)
LZW does seem simple to us now; in fact one standard Job Interview question I ask is to put the LZW algorithm on the whiteboard! However, for those of use who have been around for more than 20 years, it was a significant breakthrough.
Best Buy can have you arrested
I for one am the first to admit I don't quite get all this 'patents are evil' that seems to come from Slashdot articles.
A quick cursory overview of the patent link on IBM's patent doesn't say one thing about the GIF format, just the compression algorithm (with JCL code).
What if this patent doesn't cover GIF at all, but a hardware implementation of compression on a hard drive, or a MO drive, or some other device? They can't exactly release all claims to it that easily.
Just seems silly to 'call out' a company to release a patent. Contrary to popular belief the bigger companies out there can't turn on a dime and have hundreds of processes to do things to keep a rogue employee from releasing all claim to all patents or something crazy like that, so it could take them two years just to release something that's going to die quietly anyway.
Also speculating on what a company will/won't do with a patent based on some arbitrary IANAL comment from the editor seems a bit risky. While IBM is into Open Source heavily they're not there to stop making their stockholders money either. Patenting things lets them do so.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Use MNG and get a broken image. Which popular web browser can display MNG animations again?
Not very well I hasten to add, GIF's are still used rather a lot and even Slashdot hasn't bothered to convert all their images to PNG.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
If you're going to editorialize on a "News" site that is supposed to have some modicom of journalistic integrity, the least practice what you preach!
Why is Slashdot's own graphics full of the GIF's you so despise? Hypocrisy in action!
FindLaw, or are you too stupid to look it up?
"Hell, it's probably libel to say that"
Oh gee, and who exactly would he be "libelling" with that statement, Mr. Lawyer? The legal profession? Now that would make an interesting case.
You mock him for giving stupid legal opinions, and then you match him, stupid for stupid with your own legal opinion.
Oh, the irony!
What I found was that, while Internet Explorer has the most problem with PNG, PNGs can be displayed in all 5.x versions, provided they have HTML wrapped around them. That is, you can't always get the picture if you try to display http://a.b/this.png, it would work if you had http://a.b/this.htm, and this.htm was nothing more than an IMG tag containing http://a.b/this.png.
I took advantage of this to replace all the "display a GIF" links to add navigation buttons to the new page. (Turns out that Mozilla has this restriction, too)
Since then, I've done a lot of work with dynamically generated graphics, and it's been almost exclusively PNG. My biggest problem has been that IE and other browsers ignore the pixels/cm size parameter of PNG, and assume that all graphics are 72dpi, just like GIF. One of my most-used graphics is a 1200x1600 300dpi "label", which should be a half-page when printed. It's 4 times that size if you let the browser print it... Except when I wrap it in an IMG tag that says to scale it to 600x800!
The LZW algorithm provides terrible compression, even compared to deflate (used in ZIP and gzip). Far, far better compression is out there, like PPMD used in RAR or 7-zip, or BWT/MTF as used in bzip2 or StuffIt. It was designed to be very fast on a 4MHz machine with less than 64kb RAM, and it is. It just doesn't compress very well.
There is no use for LZW in the world today, except for accessing GIF images. Compression has moved on since 1982.
You've got nothing to lose! Want to make a lot of geeks happy and release that final patent into the public domain?
What would make me happy is not for IBM to release the patent, but to go lawsuit-crazy and start filing litigation against any web site that uses GIF. Maybe that would actually encourage people (*coughSlashdotcough*) to switch to PNG -- which, as other people have stated, is better for everything but animation, and that's only because the MNG format has almost no support.
Why is Slashdot, bastion of open source and opponent of software patents, still using GIF anyway?
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
In the JPEG standard, there are two possible compression modes for the DCT coefficients, Huffman and Arithmetic encoding. The arithmetic coding is about 10% smaller, far faster to compute, but is unfortunately proscribed by the IBM patent.
If IBM would release this patent, we could change some #defines in the JPEG code and get 10% smaller pictures with no change in quality.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
http://swpat.ffii.org/players/ibm/#gajn
Try touching up a map after it's been converted to a JPEG. It's not going to look good. Been there, done that, now I sell the T-shirts!
Native support in the browser for SVG and SVG animation would more than replace animated GIFs as well as providing lots of interesting capabilities that could be useful in other areas.
Of course, that too would be left unused because IE doesn't support it (or worse yet IE would support some bizarre proprietary MS reworking of the basic ideas).
True, but even without DirectX hacks, Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 and later will properly display every PNG image that uses no more capabilities than a still GIF image.
I think you answered your own question...
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
I guess me marching in civil rights demos and taking the gas was of no use, because in the practical real world, black people were treated as non human sub standard citizens, by the majority. I guess me marching in the anti war and anti draft marches was illogical, as you know it's the states right to concoct wars based on uttered untruths, and to place people into involuntary servitude in order to..push some agendas, and this was the default position of the majority at the time. I guess me demonstrating and lobbying against some corporate polluters was impractical, because at the time almost all the corporations just dumped whatever toxic waste they wanted to anyplace they felt like it. Over 95% of them did so. they were the "practical majority". You were going against the norm then if you sought changes or did something different, it was impractical to do so, you had to struggle harder in 'the real world" to make a point, your "side" was barely 5%, so we shouldn't have done that, according to your logic.
You see, that was "the real world" back then, the "practical" world. It was "impractical" to go against thw societal norm, and in that case it was physically impractical, as you could have been gassed, beat, arrested, serve jail time, and etc. So heaven forbid you have some internet surfer be inconvenienced by a semi non standard format on your web page,you or your corporation might suffer some "inconvenience" in your profits or something. Your profits are obviously of more worth to you, so go ahead, protect your profits, that is your right.
Let's always leave things exactly as they are now, let's none of us ever go against the norm, it is impractical, we might lose money,and as we all know, money is the most important thing in the known universe,95% of the people agree, nothing is as important as money, all other aspects of society should revolve around money, it's accumulation and restriction in as many diverse ways as can be imagined. Let's all "work" for a small number of large corporations, always seek to do those things that are dictated to us by our "betters" in those corporations and pseudo legitimate governmental agencies, because they, having the most money,and the most "practical" power and influence currently, must always surely know a better way to do anything, correct? I mean, they are the majority, so they must be "correct".
Am i the only one that reads "MNG" to sound like "minge"??
If PNG is so great why doesn't it support animation? And don't say MNG, because not even my fancy open source web browser supports them yet. JNG doesn't seem to be supported by my fancy browser either.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
From the GNU website...
"We were able to search the patent databases of the USA, Canada, Japan, and the European Union. The Unisys patent expired on 20 June 2003 in the USA, in Europe it expired on 18 June 2004, in Japan patent expired on 20 June 2004 and in Canada until 7 July 2004. "
I know this is off-topic, I just had to say it.
Yuck. If I wasn't already shunning HP, I would start now.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The point is that once GIF was obviously encumbered, people developed and moved to new (and, in fact, better) technologies. You could argue that if it wasn't for GIF patent protection, we might have been lazier about moving forward with PNG, JPG or otherwise. I don't see that there is any "hell" going on here. I bet the majority of readers here have something to do with images on a day to day basis: tell me just what proportion of this involves GIF - in other words, apart from the nice ability to slag off patents again, just who in practice is inhibited by this?
Well, it might help get rid of some of the more pointless use of Flash... That's good enough for me.
On another point, there are many here who do not understand that web pages are no longer just ways to convey word information, that it has evolved, and now supports many of the ways the brain collects information. This includes visual information.
I suppose you could just use Lynx and forget about it... if you really want to be a Luddite.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
In some limited circumstances it's possible to use alpha-transparency while gracefully degrading in IE.
For example, if you are using a solid-colour or almost-solid-colour partially-transparent image to achieve some kind of shading or tinting of the underlying background, you can do this and let IE display it as solid rather than transparent. People who only use IE will never know it was meant to be transparent and thus won't care.
The major trip-up here is that IE renders alpha-transparent PNG onto an unpredictable background colour. However, you can bypass this by adding a background colour chunk (bKGD, or something like that; it's been a while) specifying which solid colour you wish IE to render to. It will then render to that color and create the image with that color "showing through".
The limitations of IE's rendering are due to how IE was originally built to handle images. The image loaders hand the rendering component some kind of bitmap and a 1-bit transparency mask. This was a good choice at the time, but then alpha-transparent PNG came along, and since at the time GDI didn't have any mechanism to support alpha-transparency they just bodged it with the background color. At the time it didn't matter because no-one was using PNG anyway.
The new version of IE will hopefully support alpha-transparency since as of Windows 2000 GDI supports 32-bit images with (alpha,r,g,b) components, and there's already a PNG loader in the gdiplus library, so supporting it will be pretty trivial.
I'm not in a position where I can ignore technologies that are still widely used.
No one is asking you to ignore it. That's why it's called "Legacy Support" :-)
You can tell your client that at least one person will not see the animation, and that's me.
Not Found
The requested URL / was not found on this server.
Apache/2.0.46 (Red Hat) Server at iantri.ath.cx Port 80
That's what I get when I click on your sig for the guide to slackware.. funny that Red Hat is on your server (if that's what it really is).
If you would like to get MNG back into Mozilla, then you can follow/vote/contribute to Bugzilla bug 18574
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1857 4
(Please don't post useless comments on that bug)
MOD THE CHILD UP!
UnixWare's compress program (for *.Z files) is
infringing on this patent.
Where are the options for saving PNGs in GIMP 2? Is it possible to save with a smaller color palette or no alpha? All I see that looks like it might affect quality/size are an interlacing checkbox and a compression slider. I'm used to other programs that put these options in the save dialog. Maybe they are elsewhere in GIMP?
Any other tips for optimizing web images in GIMP greatly appreciated. I'm mostly thumbs with graphics.
Constitutionally Correct
OK.. I have been watching the debate for several years (it's like watching the grass grow). Here's where things are:
There are several arguments for GIF being pronounced with a HARD G:
1) "G" stands for Graphical. Graphical has a hard G.
2) The majority of people pronounce it that way.
3) Most words that start with G have a hard G.
The main case for Soft G is that the designers of the file format specifically stated in their specification document that it's a soft G.
Item 1 has been shot down as follows: Yes, G stands for graphical (*as specified by the designers of the file format*). Three problems with that:
a) The technical pronounciation of Graphical is gha-raf-i-cal. So it's not the same phonetical sound as hard G. You would need to then pronounce it Gh-IF, NOT hard G "GIF".
b) What something stands for has nothing to do with how an acronym is pronounced. Modem, for example, stands for modulation/demodulation. Is it pronounced "mah-deem"? Laser would be pronounced as if it rhymes with brassiere... etc. The fact that g stands for graphical has nothing to do with the pronounciation of the acronym.
c) If you are referring to the word "graphical" as the basis for the argument, then you are basing your argument on the the words picked by the designers, and used in the specification. And in that specification, the designers said that it's pronounced JIFF like the peanut butter. So for consistency, if you go back to the specification to determine what it stands for, then you must live by their specified pronounciation.
Item 2 has been shot down because the majority doesn't rule on matters of punctuation. (pronounciation?)
Item 3 has been shot down because there is no rule. There are MANY words that have a soft G pronounciation. People have even argued that GIF is part of Gift, and so they should sound the same. (Gin (soft g) and gink (hard g) are examples that shoot down that logic.)
So we go back to the specification... no one seems to be able to logically shoot this down. The folks who invented the file format decided what it would be called, and how to pronounce it. If you want to invent your own file format, you can pronounce it any way you want. You can even pick a symbol, and then be referred to as "The file format formerly known as Prince". But as inventor, it's your call.
I want to say this in a *gentle* way... the *gist* of my message is that most GIF pronounciation arguments amount to *gibberish*, when you consider the *general* logic behind them. I'll let the *genie* out of the bottle here: Have a *gin* and tonic, and cool your *genitals*. You have to go back to the *genesis* of the file format, at the *germination* of the idea, when they first *generated* the specification. to determine the correct pronounciation. It is soft G, like JIFF.
(it's really fun to read the posts where people write.. "Those who pronounce GIF as JIF..." and correctly read that aloud ("Those who pronounce JIF as JIF"))
OK.. let this be the definitive guide to pronouncing GIF. You can pronounce it any way you want, but if you are one who insists on being "correct", get used to saying JIF. And I haven't read a logical, solid argument YET for pronouncing it with a hard G. Right now, Soft G is winning the debate, and it's not even close!
What, are you kidding? Come on, seriously, have you ever seen a GIF image that didn't make you want to puke, aside from your own beloved buddy icon? Of course not. No graphic ever created in GIF is a useful contribution to society. Somebody SHOULD be charging a royalty and then using that money to pay for the people who've gone crazy watching the little dancing Tux or the little guy bouncing the ball around his square.
PNG may not be as popular, but does that even matter? It need not be popular, only a) useful and b) relatively ubiquitous to be a success. If it has those two things, it should, by all rights, catch on. All recent versions of major browsers support PNG (right, IE does now? if not, then I apologize and retract the second paragraph of my smart-ass reply), and that's really all that matters. You're free to build a standards-compliant website now with PNGs and reap all the alpha-channel goodness you want (oh wait, IE doesn't support that, really, does it?). Well, you can still use PNG within reason and build a free-as-in-speech-and-beer website and have a great time of it.
All you have to do is use PNGs so nobody will notice, and the world is a better place.
MNG, on the other hand, is a truly useless, unsupported format. Although again, referencing the animation ability of GIF lamented above, I can't say that MNG falling through is the worst development I've heard of, either.
$.02 that shouldn't hurt my karma too badly...
Now, they've grown into adults, but still have the belief that everyone owes them anything they want. Thus, patents are evil. Everything should be free.
you do realise I was commenting on the fact that sometimes it is better to do the currently impractical thing, if a long range better goal is of interest to you? I was using my examples, which are real, in an atrempt to literally shame some recognition and some minimal level of courage of this fact into people, to show that being afraid for your profits over such a trivial matter as a differing image format is..trivial. It is not any longer "inconvenient" in the slightest for any websurfer to stay stuck with a propietary web browser that seeks restrictions on what you use the web for, when the alternatives are at most three clicks away. It is short sighted stupidity. Even on dialup modems it is just not that hard to download and install a superior alternative. We used to have webpages that displayed a simple text message, such as "this website is optimised for.."such and such, usually a display resolution or a particular browser past a certain release number. There is no reason webpages can't be still doing that, and incorporating a link to a superior browser, superior in many ways in fact. You are doing your potential customers/visitors a favor by turning them on to a better web browser, as it is a more worthy goal to do so, if you are concerned with anything like a long term goal of improving the web in general. And to be afraid of a temporary loss of money for a longer term goal, one that will most likely make you more money in the future, is short sighted illogical business sense. If people can be impractically inconcnveninced to help bring about change for the better on very important topics,such as my original examples, than it is outright weenie cowardice to be "afraid to do it" on trivial matters such as politely informing your web page viewers they will get a better and more secure surfing experience by using a superior browser. If our society has de evolved into such ...outright cowardice and weenieness, than perhaps we deserve to be dictated to by a few corporations which seek to dominate everyone's computer experience. Perhaps people now are just so brainwashed to not go against the convenient norm that any deviation from that norm is just too scary for them to even contemplate, let alone implement. Yes, an image format is a trivial deal, that's why I was making righteous fun and using sarcasm and examples of other instances of going against the norm, the "practical real world", where it was of much more importance.
To be afraid to suggest to someone, your web page viewer, that perhaps they would be better off with another browser because you might lose a sum of money, is to me, cowardice, and also a long range business impracticality. That is my opiniopn, others may have other opinions, but I'll call "weenie coward" and "bad long range business planning" when I see it, and in this case, I definetly see it.
Here it is again, "weenie coward" and "bad long range business sense".
No wonder we have so much political wrongness going on now. People are cowards on inconsequential things, calling it "impractical",so how are they going to deal with *important* consequential things? The answer is "they won't". Weenies. A society of cud chewing, mooing, herd following drones, taught to never think for themselves or to go against some artifical "norm" dictated to them by some greedy assholes and by insane governments. Order followers, content to be lead around by the nose, to always do what they are told to do, to accept a shit sandwhich and to be trained to repeat "mmm, mmm good!" every time it shows up on their plate. Weenies, lead around by the nose by a handful of big corporations and a corrupt bribed and blackmailed government. Wimps.
And if your company/corporation/government insists you be a wimp or a coward or a retard, spit in their face and go do something else, that's what a real human with just a smidgen of integrity of courage would do.
If that offends anyone, too bad, it was intended to shame and offend.
You have lost your bet.
In its Counterclaims against SCO, IBM accused SCO of having violated one of IBM compression patents:
U.S. Patent 4,814,746
SCO have begged the judge to allow the Patent counterclaims to be bifurcated in a separate lawsuit.
It wouldn't look good for SCO to fail to contrive any Copyright infringement respective to Linux, when SCO own product UnixWare does infringe on IBM Patents.
_Arthur
... "consensus seems to be that IBM would lose any court action it tried to bring."
If SCO won anything against IBM in court they'd spin it into a "Victory against the Linux terrorists"
---
We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
It is of utmost importance, that we, as the end user, voice our dissaproval of the inability of IE to display png's correctly by:
- Using nonproprietary images
- Using browsers that properly display nonproprietary images correctly.
Without this, nothing will change. Because of the way the government is run these days, it is only a matter of time before the length on patents is extended by corporation force on the legislature (This hasn't happened in patenting, but I believe that it will, based on the copyright extensions that happened several years ago).Because of this, we need to practice what we preach. If we want the Web to be free (well ... whatever) and be able to develop our websites and whatnot without the fear of retaliation, we have to push the advancement.
Konqueror and Netscape on Linux both display png images correctly. I guess I'm just trying to step out of the dark ages.
So how about it, IBM? You've got nothing to lose! Want to make a lot of geeks happy and release that final patent into the public domain?
.... time to cash in, in their own game!
Lets count how many gif's there is in SCO's site?
And not really very good peanut butter at that -- just advertised too much on TV with all that "Choosy Mothers" hype. The very best peanut butter is Once Again Nut Butter but it is difficult to find. As far as the mass-produced commercial peanut butters go, I prefer Skippy Roasted Honey over Peter Pan or Jif anyday.
If you're a chocolate freak, you might even want to skip the peanuts altogether and try everyone's favorite hazelnut + chocolate concoction - Nutella instead.
...and you were actually using it then...,
That, of course, should have read
"and you weren't actually using it"
I traded email with several people who know the history of this algorithm and its patents fairly well.
Typical Slashdot journalism. Unnamed people you e-mailed today who "know the history of this algorithm." That's certainly a good reason to go ahead and make such a legal claim.
There are several arguments for GIF being pronounced with a HARD G:
You forgot a few:
4) The pronounciation of "JIF" sounds frickin' stupid.
5) JIF is in fact another file format. Which, strangely enough, has the extension "*.JIF".
6) JIF is a peanut butter, and I ain't using no graphics format that sticks to the roof of your mouth.
7) Bob Berry can go suck eggs as far as I'm concerned. He pronounces it JIF? So freakin' what. He also used a patented compression algorithm for it and that's a pretty big fuckup, to my mind. So who really gives a damn what he thinks?
It's a hard-G now and forever, and if you don't like it, well, tough shit.
Indeed quite a lot of patents nowadays are on inventions thought out in a day or less. A good human brain knowing all necessary background information and working for a whole day can really invent some extremely nonobvious and useful things (just ask Linus or John Carmack how many extremely clever ideas they come up with in a month), especially for people working on another field. Patents were created for fear some important inventions will not get invented until much later if the first inventor doesn't disclose its innerworkings, which may be reasonable in the old "slow" days, but is much less convincing a reason in these days with so many R&D people around to reinvent things again and again.
If they tried to enforce it, it would be quickly thrown out on the basis that there exists documented prior art. Their patent is really just for show, so it doesn't matter what they do with it. Lempel-Ziv is thus, for all practical matters, in the public domain. Who cares what IBM does with it?
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
IBM is a big company, there is no process within IBM to even entertain suggestions like this. RSA had the decency and good faith to release the RSA algorithm into the public domain 1 month prior to the patent expiration. Unisys on the other hand, probably nobody within Unisys even had a clue how to go about suggesting doing a gesture like this (even if someone in their had thought of it). After all .. releasing the patent into the public domain about a month prior to expiration would have had no negative effect.
.. IBM is too big of an elephant. I am sure there are many IBM employees out there who agree that the patent should be released to the public domain .. but none of them have the ability to escalate the idea to anyone who can make a decision.
So anyway my point is
He's right; it's one of IBM's counterclaims against SCO. Of course, if any part of SCO's motion to bifurcate (split off the patent suits), IBM could elect to drop it and later dispose of the patent somehow. You can read a transcript of the relevant hearing here on Groklaw.
SCO's answer to IBM's counterclaims accuses it, among other things, of selectively enforcing it. I'm not quite sure what basis there is in law for using that as a defense, however, or if that was just boilerplate text in SCO's reply.
Item 2 has been shot down because the majority doesn't rule on matters of punctuation. (pronounciation?)
Actually, the majority do rule on matters of pronounciation when it comes to English. The major linguistic project of English (the Oxford English Dictionary) is a descriptive not a prescriptive document. That means that once a significant minority of English users use or pronounce a word in a certain way, it'll get recorded in the dictionary.
All this is just to say that both "jif" and "gif" are acceptable pronounciations of GIF.
I have a lot of opinions about Cyborgs and Architects
You can indeed get IE 5.5 and above on Windows to display PNG images with alpha transparency, by using IE's built-in DirectX filters against themselves. For example:
r (src='images/next.png', sizingMethod='scale', enabled='true'); display:inline-block"><img src="images/next.png" alt="IE-compatibility link" width="36" height="52" style="filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=0) ;"></div>
<div style =" width: 36px; height: 52px; filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoade
This doesn't interfere with other browsers which support PNG natively because they just see the standard IMG tag and ignore the filter stuff. Whereas on IE, the filter in the IMG tag prevents the (wrong) image from being displayed, and the one in the DIV tag actually does display it properly. Goodness knows why they make you jump through the hoops though; given the IE on MacOS just works, it's obvious that Microsoft as a company don't have a problem with understanding or implementing the specs. Do they just not share code between platforms in Redmond, or what?
It doesn't support PNG transparency though.
I didn't bet anything.
Adding yet another patent to their (Note:)counter-claims doesn't qualify as 'going after someone' in my books. I think IBM put everything they could possibly bring up into their counterclaims.
That does not necessarily mean IBM themselves think this patent is valuable. It just means that they think it was 'worth a shot'; It's still better than anything SCO has.
It wouldn't look good for SCO to fail to contrive any Copyright infringement respective to Linux, when SCO own product UnixWare does infringe on IBM Patents.
You don't seem to know what you're hoping for. If the IBM patent is valid, Linux could be threatened too because gzip can read LZW compressed files.
AFAIK the conclusion that LZW compressed files could be decompressed legally was based on analysis of the Unisys patent, not the IBM one.
If the IBM patent is valid, then Linux could also be infringing.
I for one, will certainly be hoping IBM loses this counterclaim.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
is a plus in my books.
And here is how you force IE into properly supporting PNG transparency.
Works like a charm, doesn't introduce any MS "extensions" into your documents, and doesn't do anything if the user is smart enough to be using a web browser that actually supports standards.
- chrish
You'd think that a geek CMS system would recognize the importance of being standards compliant.
/. isn't alone in using invalid and outdated code. Both Kuro5hin (scoop) and Metafilter crap out too.
Unfortunately
I'm not in any way related to them, but Drupal not only validates, but is XTML 1.0 Strict!
As for you marching, whatever makes you feel better. If it did, it was logical. If you really think you made a difference in policy decisions, you didn't.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
AC quoted the abstract: which modifies the data compression method of Lempel and Ziv
What do you think the W in LZW means? Welch modified an earlier Lempel and Ziv technique to produce LZW which, IIRC, formed the Unisys patent. The IBM patent appears to be similiar but I haven't examined it closely (life is too short).
FWIW, the abstract of a patent is NOT the important bit. It's the "claims" which you should check.
This is actually doable, it's just convoluted and requires a browser-detect. I did this at a client last year. Google "alphaimageloader png internet explorer" for info.
IANAL, but this is one of the key ways in which patents differ from, say, trademarks. The patent owner owns the patent and does not lose their intellectual property if they do not enforce it. (Else submarine patents would be impossible.)
The very oldest Linux-related archive files
are often in the UNIX compress *.tar.Z format.
People at the Free Software Foundation saw this
to be a problem for their GNU system project,
so they had the patent-free gzip program written.
The *BSD projects essentially beg for a lawsuit.
BTW, the original bzip (not bzip2) and the better
type of JPEG compression both infringe on a
different IBM patent. That's the one we should
want to have opened. IBM would even gain some
licensing fees if they did a GPL-only license
for it.
Wrong.
That's a techie urban-legend. The truth is that IE6 does support all required PNG features. Therefore it "supports PNG".
Yes, IE6 doesn't support PNG transparency, at least not in any easy way. However PNG transparency is an optional part of the PNG spec. That IE6 doesn't support transparency properly is unfortunate but doesn't invalidate their meeting the required PNG spec.
Furthermore as others have pointed out there are indeed work-arounds (ugly ones) that will enable reliable PNG transparency on IE6. Also as others have pointed out (including MS staffers) even if IE7 were to ship tomorrow and support PNG et al we'd still be stuck with a huge IE6-using population for years to come.
It would be great if IE, and indeed all of the browsers, were to fully meet all relevant standards. It would also be great if they were to then go on and meet more of the optional parts of those standards, including PNG transparency. However lets hold everyone's feet to the fire on these, not pick on one author's neglecting a feature many would like while they and others are still missing more fundamental required parts of specs.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Until it works, it's not supported.
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
According to the stats at this link (thanks to an earlier poster), IE share is declining, with IE6 being only 72% and IE5 just over 8%. Mozilla (>12%) makes up most of the rest, with Opera, Netscape and others trailing.
The 95% figure may be the Windows share of the market (more like 94.5% by that link), but not everyone using Windows uses IE. (If I'm setting up a desktop that has to have Windows, Mozilla is the first app I load on it, and then remove the IE icon from the desktop.)
The recent notices from Homeland Security about IE being unsafe will only accelerate this.
-- Alastair
Mostly, IBM uses it's patent portfolio defensively - just to allow it to do anything it wants without fear from some ridiculous lawsuit. Though I am sure they sue egregious offenders offensively, I don't think I've heard of any high-profile case like on-click or the like with IBM at the plantiff's table.
Marc
The browser could never know if ASP or JSP or neither was used.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
I have asked this question EVERY time a discussion between GIF and PNG has come out and still have to get a satisfactory answer:
I have heard it said many times that you can achieve some really amazing compression rates with PNG while still maintaining a surprising amount of image quality.
First, Is this true?
Second, If it is true, which compression tools do I use and what parameters do I specify to achieve better than GIF or JPG compression?
Third, In my experience, it depends on the picture you're trying to compress. Is there ANY way that I can configure a PNG compression tool to CONSISTENTLY (or atleast 80% of the time) produce better compression and image quality than either GIF or JPEG?
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
If IBM would release this patent, we could change some #defines in the JPEG code and get 10% smaller pictures with no change in quality.
Yes, but almost no existing software (including browsers and image viewers) would read them because they don't contain a decoder for that sort of JPEG.
a better standard (referring to PNG) , though sadly still a less popular one
Not that I'm trying to be flamebait for OSDN, but the very icons applied to this article (in the upper-right corner) are none other than the very GIF standard that was put down in this article. Just thought I'd point that out.
==========
Intelligence should not be rewarded; ignorance should be punished
==========
GIFs can be used properly to good effect. Just don't convert a high-color picture to GIF automatically. *shrug* Much the same way you could compress an AVI in 16 colors then say AVI sucks.
I hope you're joking there...
Rather than assert this man's a git, how about you address the issue directly?
There is no "correct" pronunciation. Some assert there is, based on the creator's intent. This fella asserts there is based on how English is often pronounced. Each tries to assert there is a correct pronunciation without trying to support why their method is *more* valuable.
AUTHOR
The author did indeed pronounce it [JIF].
ACRONYM v. SOURCE WORDS
Acronyms are pronounced as words themselves, not with how the source words are pronounced. Yes, he's a git.
ENGLISH
If pronounced as an English word, it can either be [JIF] (the exception) or [GIF] (the rule). (Maybe he's not so badly a git. This is what he was thinking of, but used the wrong explanation.) CERT can be [SURT] or [KURT] or [CHURT], with likelihood in that order.
USAGE and COMMUNICATION
If someone had told me they were going to send me some [JIF]s, I'd've wondered what the hell they were talking about. If they'd said they were going to send me some [GIF]s, I'd've understood. Linus might pronounce Linux [LEENOOKS], but it seems [LINNUKS] is plenty comprehensible. What if someone's program was spelled m-o-o but pronounced by the author as [KOW KOW]? Those not in the know would call it [MOO]. To communicate with the masses you'd have to call it [MOO] too, or be miscommunicating. This important and practical point seems missed by folks who go smugly for the Author-Pronounced-It-This-Way validation.
Whatever you call it, get rid of it. Be glad there might be more hassle around keeping it, and that this means greater adoption of a better standard, PNG, which even improves on the original by having an author-blessed pronunciation that matches how you would pronounce the acronym if it were an English word.
I'm not sure how the licensing kept you from studying it before. Slacker.
Who cares? Why aren't people using PNG instead?
John Kerry is a Joke!
I used to pronounce it gif, but a friend who worked at Compuserve told me he heard form the inventor (who worked at Compuserve) pronounce it and he said jif.
So it's jif. The inventor calls it jif, so jif is correct.
But you can call it anything you want.
IBM should sue anyone that uses GIF, simply on principle of it being an old, tired format. What's the benefit of GIF? Only thing I can think of is low-color strobing ads. Yeah, great benefit.
Instead of do anything with the patent, IBM should make note of the patent, and then tell people that PNG is better... or something like that.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
...how is JIF pronounced? What is the benefit to overloading "JIF" to mean "GIF" also? It sound like peanut butter when you say it like that.
I don't care how the designer pronounces it. I don't care what some people think is "correct". I care more about what's right. I say it with a hard G because the other way is intrinsicly stupid, and if I ever meet the designer I won't hesitate to tell him that.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's down right now..
I can't remember the last time I needed a silly animated GIF for anything.
Remember these applications.
Use Flash for animation
AFAIK, those who use SWF are locked into a single-vendor solution. Or where is a reasonably complete independent implementation of an SWF player?
Parent's logic is correct as far as I'm concerned. Additionally, if GIF gets pronounced "jif", then it's audibly indistinguishable from the JIF image format (a comparatively obscure but LZW-free GIF alternative).
W3Schools.com is aimed at DIY (do it yourself; as opposed to developers who use Front Page or even Dreamweaver to auto generate ugly HTML/CSS) developers...it's not exactly a typical cross section of browser users. 95% is a more typical number for those using IE from other sites. In fact, I've seen the numbers posted higher for some sites. Btw, the IE6/5 ratio is skewed as well. IE5 is still more used than IE5.5 and has about half as many users as IE6.
I could have sworn that somebody had Google's stats posted on the web somewhere, but I can't find them now. Google (aimed at everyone) would have much more representative stats than W3 Schools.
Hooray! The gd FAQ says that GIF support will be returning to the gd library. Thanks Tom!
Of course there's bits of AIX in Linux. However, SCO does not own everything in AIX, just because they think they own Sys V. (I say 'think' because at this point we still don't even really know [if they have rights/what rights they have] for Sys V.
IBM owns AIX. IBM can do whatever the fuk it wants with AIX. The license for the Sys V code does not require IBM to transfer ownership of their modifications (AIX) back to SCO.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Here, this should give you a taste of the extreme side of patent hatred (written by me, of course)
extreme patent hatred
Then again free religion and free slaves were "extreme" views, and the Earth being a round planet that is not the center of the universe was so extreme people were mudered over it. Sometimes, it's just more important to be right.
It never terminates ...
They will not have innovation for everyones!!! :(
open4free ©
Perhaps now, we can have that version of XV that supposedly is hiding in the backroom...
try www.trilon.com and get reminiscent about an old viewer
Huh. If IBM received a patent on the same algorithm after Unisys, then it isn't valid now! An expiration date of two years from now does not imply validity. Amazing how carefully our Patent and Trademark Office does its research, isn't it? How many other duplicative patents are out there?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
An interesting article, but I suspect the real reason the ancient chinese never developed IP law is because they had no use for it. The only ones who could read were the educated elite, and they didn't need to rely on their writings to live. Copyrights in England started when starving poets tried to get something back for their work....
Ummm....this isn't off-topic because....uh....some ancient Chinese author was named Ping...
Qxe4
You can't use CSS2 selectors, you have to make sure to use extra divs and such to work around IE's box model mistakes, and you have to specify some things in odd ways.
Only a few of those things can be fixed without doing browser detection tricks.
And Heaven help you if you want to support Gecko, KHTML, IE and Opera browsers! Personally, I make sure it works in Safari and Firefox, and IE be damned. I also don't create Web sites professionally; that task is relegated to the Web team here, who create table driven cut'n'pasted nowhere near valid DOCTYPE lacking bastardised excuses of HTML, which "Works in IE."
I'd rather have that 72% of peopel still using a browser that no IT professional can seriously recommend suffer for their ignorance.
The Canadian patent CA1,223,965 expires on the 6th June 2004.
Isn't it July already?
Do your best, hope for the best, suspect the worst.
Only on slashdot is a 72 percent marketshare only. Users are stupid. That's why we call them lusers. IE6 is the default, therefore it will remain around a while.
Sidenote: First post from my wonderul new linux desktop. w00t.
SAILING MISHAP
You must be mad. Gif certainly hasn't withered at all!
JPEG and GIF are NOT competing formats! Yes gif is 256 color, if an image is 256 color or less a gif will pretty much ALWAYS be smaller and faster to render than a JPEG.
The other places gifs are used is for animations and transparency. JPEG supports neither of these.
JPEGS on the other hand are good for things which need lots of colors, mainly photos... and not much of anything else.
No friend, comparing jpeg to gif is apples to oranges, where comparing gif to png is apples to apples.
IE doesn't support transparency, gifs DO support transparency.
If there is some other feature of PNG's IE is lacking it's insignificant enough I'm not even aware of it.
What precisely were you referring to?
Sadly, because few bother to check their facts properly, the Unisys LZW patent has actually been dead for about 1.5 years, and no one noticed.
The LZW patent, 4,558,302, became a patent on December 10, 1985. Patents from that time frame last 17 years from the date they become a patent.
So, lets do the math. December 10, 1985 + 17 years = 2002.
The patent actually expired December 10, 2002.
E.g. Eric Weisstein's Treasure Trove of the Life Cellular Automaton contains 236 animated GIFs.
With the patent expiry happening, I even developed a CGI script which inputs a particular subset of patterns written by Andrew Trevorrow's LifeLab and outputs an animation of however many generations and whatever display window is nominated, but I'm not about to invite a Slashdotting of a tool only designed for personal use and running on a limited capacity server.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Actually, IE5.5+ does have support for PNG alpha-blending. It's hidden in a filter called AlphaImageLoader, and can be enabled through a javascript hack.
Webmasters everywhere take note! You can use cool semitransparent images!
Everyone is obsessed with "alpha transparency" these days.
The most useful aspect of PNG is that it is a proper open standard with portable implementations. It was designed to handle 32-bit RGBA images from the outset (c.f. GIF that does 8-bit pallete-based colour). It has better (and unpatented) compression. That compression is lossless, so it works extremely well on artificial images (e.g. icons, screen shots and cartoons) compared with JPEG which uses a form of lossy compression better suited to realistic images such as photographs. You can decompress a PNG and be assured of getting exactly what you started with. When you decompress a JPEG you get an approximation to what you started with, of vfarying quality depending on how much data you chose to throw away during compression. Also because of the algorithm (discrete cosine transformation) used in analysing the image, artifacts are introduced. You can see these if you look closely. It's a kind of patchy effect like a kind of woven table placemat.
So you see, alpha transparency is only an added bonus. Anyone still using GIFs is either ignorant or is condemned to use Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Stick Men