The fast track to GIF irrelevancy
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The latest target of such passion is Unisys, which has come out of the woodwork to tell Web siteowners they In a Don't get mad, get even But since there's no point in burning GIFs if no suitable replacement exists,how do we proceed from here? GIFs have played a solid role to date in non-photographic Web art --logos, typefaces, and so on. They're normally limited to 256 colors butthey can be animated and can display transparent backgrounds. For photoquality graphics, the Enter PNG PNG (pronounced "ping") doesn't have the 256-color limit of GIF,and its compression routines are not covered by patents. It's growingin popularity, but is not totally there yet. All the necessary framework is there: a mature and solid specification;a significant community of developers and supporters; and a Greg Roelofs, who authored the PNG book and maintains its Web site, sayshe's delighted that PNG is starting to receive the attention itdeserves. "We've been flooded with interest," he said. "The spec isrock solid, and should be going into the Going mainstream Most modern browsers can view in-line PNG images without the need forplug-ins. Oddly, Internet Explorer has some support for PNG A number of Web pages, including Despite all this, support for PNG animation and interlaced images, and theability to properly display transparent backgrounds, is still missing fromtoday's browsers. While Roelofs believes that support for these featureswill come shortly, PNG won't be widely seen as a complete GIF replacementuntil support arrives. So maybe it's a bit hasty to burn GIFs this week. On the other hand, thereare many who would be overjoyed at the demise of all those obnoxious animatedWeb graphics. In the meantime, make sure your GIF files, no matter whattheir origin, are read into and out of a licensed tool. And let's do everything we can to encourage theuse of PNG, and do to GIF what was done to ARC. On a sadder note... Stevens' Web site was notworking at press time, but Google caches of Did Richard Stevens' teachings help you? Let us know in the
Impossible? Not really. Think of how quickly, a decade ago, the BBS worldchanged from using ARC compression to ZIP. That story,also sparked by ill-advised legal threats, is well-known enough to belisted in the MIT computer jargon dictionary under arc wars.
By far the most common format being advanced to replace GIF is
Roelofs agrees that applications support -- especially in Web browsers andmainstream graphics programs -- is critical to PNG's success. "The bestsupport, by far, is in Gimp, but other companies such as Corel and Adobeare coming along nicely," he said. "Microsoft has been very difficult todeal with, yet interestingly, their Macintosh people have been verysupportive."
We must note in these pages the passing of
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