18 years for that transition to happen. That may be the slowest thing to ever happen on the Internet.
The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF
51–60 of 111 posts
Re: The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Webkit's stance is basically "we're only doing it if upstream libpng supports it" (because APNG support basically requires a couple hooks in libpng itself) but the libpng devs refuse to accept the patch for apng support because they are of the opinion that libpng should process only PNG, not derivative formats, which is what they consider APNG.
In fairness I can see it from the libpng guy's perspective. It will make their library larger and potentially less fit for a certain purpose. Why hasn't someone forked libpng, added the apng patch and then made it available for WebKit? Then everyone is happy. Just needs a middle-man.
No need to fork libpng. Currently, vanilla libpng and apng patch are both hosted on sourceforge, and it's trivial to automatically download both and apply the patch. In fact, a few distros (Arch, Gentoo, Mandriva, FreeBSD) already do exactly that for their libpng packages.
But keep in mind that apng patch only adds a few functions to libpng API, and it's entirely up to applications to actually use those API calls to request extra frames.
Re: The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF
#5318 years for that transition to happen. That may be the slowest thing to ever happen on the Internet.
I think IPv6 is slower: 20 years since it started being developed.
Re: The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup, great point. I think if there weren't patent concerns over GIF years ago, there wouldn't have been nearly as wide support for the format, which means far fewer people would be using it today.
Sounds like there's need for a startup that fakes patents for obsolete file formats to create pressure for the industry to switch to technically superior alternatives. Who wants to fund me?
You should patent that idea.
Re: The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF
#55Re: The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF
#56I could have done without the colour "correction" nonsense that PNG introduced: http://hsivonen.iki.fi/png-gamma/
Re: The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF
#57I really wonder why GIFs are still around. Apart for being used as short videos for funny things they have not a huge use afaik. They really feel like an old technology. They are also a pain to support on android.
GIF has a certain mindshare that the other formats don't, crossing over into folks who are less deeply technical.
I've worked with a couple web designers and developers that said "Gif" to mean any image, as in "Move that gif up twenty pixels" when referring to a logo that's actually JPEG. I think it's a holdover from the days of BBSes and AOL and CompuServe, where everything really was a GIF. "Check out this new cheerleader Gif I got." It's not a far leap to imagine these users just out of habit and familiarity clicking GIF in the save-as dialog without really thinking about it. So GIF persists out of familiarity and inertia.
Re: The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF
#58Now if only animated pngs were more supported http://caniuse.com/apng
At the PNG Group we designed the MNG format for animated images, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-image_Network_Graphics
I remember you guys wanted to create simplified MNG 2.0, without stuff like MAGN and delta-PNG. What happened to it?
Re: The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's because of IE. I know IE sopports transparent PNGs for quite a while, but until not very long ago there were not so many options and people don't really like to upgrade IE apparently.
Binary transparency PNGs (i.e. no separate alpha channel) have worked in IE since at least 6. So except for animation support there really is no reason to use GIF.
Some GIF's compress to less data, even after running pngout/optipng/pngcrush.