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GIF Support Returns to GD
g_adams27 writes "Legions of geeks and developers owe a debt of gratitude to Tom Boutell and his "gd" library, which powers the drawing and graphic-generating tools used by dozens of open-source projects. And now, with the expiration of the last Unisys patent on the GIF format, support for GIFs has finally been reinserted in gd. The GIF/PNG/MNG wars may continue, but having more options is good!"
The usual crowd of nincompoop Slashbots are going to crow "They should just leave it out! Everyone should use PNG anyway!!"
... GIF is still the only available option.
Let me answer that in advance by reminding everyone that GIF is a useful format. Everything can read it and display it. It's been around for two decades and is now a completely open and unencumbered standard.
And let's not forget that when you need to display an image that is non-lossy, and supports transparency, and displays properly in Internet Explorer (shame on you for using Internet Explorer in the first place, but we'll accept that a lot of people still do)
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Not complete lack of support, but IE's PNG support is partly broken. Mostly in that it doesn't support alpha transparency, though all other major browsers do. And that's a real shame because it's a very nice feature. This alone would give PNG a clear advantage over GIF if it wasn't for the fact that the only major browser that doesn't support it happens to account for over 90% of the user base.