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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
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
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
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.
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.
Give
It
Free
You can't make animations with PNG files....
Sure you can, only the result is called MNG.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Beware of Geeks bearing GIF's
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.
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
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
#
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
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.
But GIF is the worst format for animations ever!
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.
Alpha channels are useful for antialiased drawings that are not dependant on a specific background.
But Slashdot's current HTML isn't standard either. I've had modern browsers completely barf on some of the slashcode output, splitting the screen in half. They are still using the CENTER and FONT tags, and ANY properly-written older browser will ignore newer HTML or CSS stuff. If you are running a low end machine, stick with a properly written low end browser. Don't blame new standards for odd rendering in old, crappy browsers.
AFAIK, lossless means that no matter how many times you RE-save an image, it doesnt lose image data; in which case, yes, a GIF IS lossless.
Actually that patent is being used in IBM's (second amended) counterclaims in the SCO v IBM case.
JeR
bloating their sites with transparent effects where it is not needed.
Every once in a while somebody seems to open their mouth without realizing they have no clue what they are talking about.
How exactly is a transparent image bloat? I did a test. As a gif a logo I have is 3.32K without alpha and 3.33K with alpha. A PNG (both regular and alpha) it was 3.45K. That should dispel both the claims that PNG is bigger and that transparency adds bloat.
And what do you do everytime you change a websites background color? Change the image?
...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
Just use Sleight to make PNG transparency work with IE on your site.
Animated GIFs are an ugly hack that the PNG people didn't want to repeat. Splitting animated and non-animated images into two formats was the right thing to do. Unfortunately, since MNG supports so many fancy features beyond just simple animations, its adoption has been virtually nil - unlike PNG which is widely supported even on Windows with IE (for the most part).
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Well I really don't have time to do 1000 logos and checking their file size. I can tell you from experience, though, that tranparency does not cause bloat. That was really my main point.
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.
You couldn't be more wrong. If people could use PNG the way it's supposed to be used, we could have rounded corner graphics that don't suck, change background colors without having to modify all images to match, have different background colors on different pages without the need for extra graphics for each different color background, allow user-selectable page colors, et cetera. It would actually save a lot of bandwidth.
As it is, there is very little benefit to using PNG in most cases, so people don't switch.
And PNGs with alpha-transparency are not "bloated" by any means.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
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?
I think the previous poster meant that IE lacks support for PNG-24's 8 bit alpha.
See, PNG supports 256 levels of transparency. Gradients. Oh, the joy of no jagged edges.
The problem is, yes, a 24 bit PNG with 8 bits of alpha can get rather large, especially when they are used for what they weren't intended for; replacing JPGs.
Open up this link in anything but IE (I tested it with Mozilla and Opera) to see some 8-bit alpha. And a cool little demo to boot.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
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.
To reiterate, GIF is essentially lossless, but only in two conditions: The image is less than 256 colors raw, or the image was a gif originally (basically the same condition.) Now, PNG is also lossless, and while GIF is still the most common standard, Mozilla supports PNG well, and IE pretends to support it resulting in an okay method, meaning it doesn't have to remain standard. After all, [intentionally ridiculous analogy]the horse and buggy was once the standard for transportation.[/intentionally ridiculous analogy]
I'm always right and I can prove it, because to the best of my knowledge, I've never been wrong.
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.
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.
Exactly. I'm not a full-time web developer, so I don't even think on these issues too hard most of the time. Recently I had to write a little network-monitoring app. I coded the output in standards-compliant XHTML 1.1, standards-compliant CSS for styling stuff, and I used PNGs with transparent backgrounds for certain little icons. I only tested my app in Firefox (yeah, my mistake). Later someone who actually uses IE tried to use my little web app, and found gray background squares around all my supposedly transparent-backgrounded images. Sucked. Now I know what all you web developers already knew - I have to put a background color on these pngs which matches the background they're placed on that I specified in my stylesheet. How redundant and stupid.
11*43+456^2
Just to set the record straight:
When I led the process of drafting the PNG specification, GIF animation did not yet exist. Animation was not part of the original GIF specification. The GIF89a specification *did* offer a mechanism for including multiple images in a single file, and a very basic (but, in retrospect, effective) mechanism for replacing only a specified part of the preceding image. But whether this was supposed to be animation with a time component was never defined, and there was in fact no way to specify how long each frame was supposed to appear, probably because the real intent was to be able to compose a single final still image from many sections. Multiple image GIFs were a footnote to the GIF specification which hardly anybody used until Netscape stepped in.
Netscape's animated GIF format was a clever hack on top of this: they defined a new GIF chunk to specify the pause between frames.
Here's the kicker: Netscape was repeatedly invited to participate in the PNG design process. They had someone reading the list, I gather, but they never offered any suggestions or contributions. If they had, they would likely have been considered very seriously.
But instead, the first we heard of GIF animation was its public release in Netscape (2.0 beta, if I recall correctly). They could have contributed to the design of a PNG or MNG that did include animation and, by way of that compelling feature, would have been more likely to quickly replace GIF. But they didn't.
We (the PNG designers) did consider retrofitting animation into PNG when Netscape's animated GIF appeared. In fact, I lobbied for that at one point. Unfortunately we had already finalized the functional specification and there was no hope of reaching agreement on how to "jam in" the animation feature at the last minute on top of an otherwise pretty elegant image format.
Instead, the MNG group was formed to create a specification for a powerful lossless animation format. And they succeeded -- but MNG has yet to really catch fire, and animated vector formats like SWF and SVG are gradually replacing animated GIF anyway for most purposes. At the end of the day, lossless bitmap animation is a pretty bandwidth-intensive proposition.
Check out the Apostrophe open-source CMS: http://www.apostrophenow.com/
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.
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.
I'll expand on this statement a bit. MNG has so much extra stuff, it starts to feel like Flash animation. So, the question for designers becomes "is it a straight forward animation, or does it need some cool logic and effects?". The answer is either GIF, or Flash, respectively. MNG is not good enough for the 2nd choice, and overboard for the first choice. Sure, you can use MNG for the first choice, but then you feel dirty for not using it to its fullest potential. (Plus, as others have said, it's not supported by popular apps)
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).
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".
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. "
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?
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.
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.
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!
Standard compliant xhtml, css, png. Clearly you're not a full time web developer. If you were, you'd have done it all in ugly flash!
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.
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.
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.
Actually, you cannot (legally) use a patented technology without permission from the patent holder, even if you don't make money from it.
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?
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
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.
Forget Lynx; use Telnet instead. If the content is not readable it's probably not worth it anyway.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
If you're smart enough to come up with the next great compression algoritm, I encourage you to do so!
Best Buy can have you arrested
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.
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
I doubt that something like this may be the case, but it does sound quite possible. However I don't feel that they would be willing to let this go.
/ LC link.htm
I have heard that IBM uses its large warehouse of patents purely as a method of protecting itself from lawsuits. Upon digging around a bit, I found that IBM had done the same thing to Sun that it is now trying against SCO.
http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html
The number of patents that IBM has surely must number in the millions by now. I wouldn't be surprised if they had patented parts of most of what you see in the computer world these days. Either that or have patents on its prior art.
I find it unlikely that IBM would really want to go to the effort of launching lawsuits against nearly everybody and everything that ever touched code and become another SCO.
We've also already heard that IBM does not prosecute their patents against open source developers.
http://bca.cryst.bbk.ac.uk/bca/cnews/2003/MAR03
So I really have no problem with them sitting on it and suing other companies that try and leverage it as intellectual property against them.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
The browser could never know if ASP or JSP or neither was used.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
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.
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Intelligence should not be rewarded; ignorance should be punished
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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.
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