What Is The Future of PNG?

miladus writes "The GIF patent (held by Unisys) will expire on June 20. C|Net wonders whether that will also mean that PNG "will lose its original reason for being". Remember Burn All GIFs? " My hope would be that at this point PNG can stand on its own technical merits, rather then on ideological merits.

PNGs

[Gortbusters.org]

Unfortunately even half my coworkers don't know what a PNG is. I try to send them a UML diagram made from DIA and they demand a readable format :(

not yet...

[5prite]

until GIF gives us more than Alpha channel with more than 1 bit :)...

here's hoping.

[porter235]

I am dying for full PNG support in all major browsers... the 256 levels of transparency alone make it worth while!

Let's face it

[nutznboltz]

You can't get rid of a graphics file format once it's out there.

Beta was better than VHS

[vasqzr]

Just because PNG is 'better' than GIF, doesn't mean it'll win.

GIF has such a huge head start...

Its already moribund

[Lysander Luddite]

Until IE fully supports the format, it might as well be dead. Nobody who wants the Alpha Channel support can use it in IE6 so it pretty much just sits there, an unused option.

Since IE apparently won't be getting an update until the next version of Windows, I don't see much changing.

It also doesn't help that creating PNGs with Alpha Channels isn't as easy as it can be in some apps.

no animation support, but...

[Kegetys]

Only thing GIF has what PNG does not is animation support... PNG wins in everything else. And most of the GIF animations I have seen do nothing else than annoy so i'm not sure if the lack of it in PNG is a good or bad thing after all.

Re:here's hoping.

[questamor]

Same here, and it's pretty close. Most browsers support it in some fashion, and it IS technically superior to GIF format images.

It's a little like MP3 vs OGG, except PNG is far closer to acceptance in general applications than OGG is for music.

Curiously, does IE support more than one alpha channel with PNG? last I looked it didn't, but that was a long long time ago; most everything else did at the time

Technical Merits...

[Jasin Natael]

My hope would be that at this point PNG can stand on its own technical merits, rather then on ideological merits.

It certainly does for me. PNG tends to display colors more accurately than GIF, has cleaner dithering, and has much better transparency than GIF. It also generates smaller files for complex/large images. But, Internet Explorer once again holds us back. IE doesn't do transparency AT ALL for PNG images. It doesn't even use the page color, or white, just a flat 50% gray. Once IE supports PNG properly, a lot more web developers will feel comfortable using it. Curse you and your "standards", Microsoft.

Jasin Natael

what a whore

[CrazyJim0]

"We haven't evaluated the new recommendation for PNG, and it remains to be seen whether the new version will have an effect on the use of GIF images," said Unisys representative Kristine Grow. "If so, the patent situation will have achieved its purpose, which is to advance technological innovation. So we applaud that."

When the serial killer is born that executes corrupt lawyers, leeches and vampires, this Kristine Grow whore should be killed too.

I'm tired of people who just want money standing in the way of real workers, and then claiming that they're blood leeching is beneficial.

Re:Sure

[$alex_n42]

Except of course animations, PNG will never do that. Plus IE won't display PNGs correctly, for some stupid reason or other.

Re:problems with PNG

[aziraphale]

large file size versus GIF or JPEG? Hardly. Take a 24 bit RGB image as your source, and find the format that provides the best reproduction of the original image in the least amount of space. PNG wins hands down. GIF can't reproduce the colour depth, JPEG can't reproduce the original pixels reliably without balloning the file size way beyond the PNG.

PNG is actually about the best lossless image format out there - better compression than TIFF LZW, and just as flexible.

Re:Sure

[Anonymous Coward]

The stupid reason is IE. Microsoft has never implemented proper PNG support.

Re:problems with PNG

[lowmagnet]

It's not poor standardization. It's Microsoft not supporting 100% of the standard. PNG is standardized just fine, thanks. [w3.org]

Part of why PNG hasn't been a big hit

[jht]

GIF and JPG each do something quite well. GIF is well-suited for the rendering of static elements with a relatively small palette, like webpage design elements. It doesn't support photo-realistic images, but that's OK - a GIF can make a very small, efficient file that can load quickly. And it's been supported since the earliest days of the Internet.

JPG compliments GIF by providing a way to display high-quality photo images, and you can control the size of the rendered file by deciding how much you're willing to discard. Again, it's supported by every editor and browser, and it's been around since the beginnning.

PNG is a superior format to GIF from a technical perspective, and it's not encumbered by the LZW patent. However, from the perspective of most mainstream users, it doesn't solve a problem that actually affects them (they don't know or care about the Unisys patent issue), it isn't perfectly supported by all mainstream browsers and servers in use today, and it's a johnnie-come-lately to the standards wars.

Like it or not (I think it kinda sucks), most web developers seem to do things one of three ways: if they need small static elements they use GIF, for photos they use JPG, and if they need fancy-schmancy stuff they use Flash. And nobody worries whether or not platforms other than Windows with the latest IE can render their site, anyway. So maybe PNG will slowly become more common - it is a better format for the most part than GIF is, and pretty much all current browsers and servers (going forward - not some of the older versions that are still in use) support it pretty well out of the box. Really, what matters most is the bottom line (especially once the LZW patent is dead) - can PNG produce a better browsing experience for a site's users? If it can, it'll get used. If not, then it's dead.

The unfortunate truth

[bahamat]

is that PNG will never see large scale use until all of it's features are supported in IE. I would love to use PNG for everything, except that they look like hell in IE. And as much as I badger people about using Mozilla, they don't.

GIF does have full support in IE, and nobody seems to know that the patent even exists. Even those that do rarely care enough to even tell one person.

This is the truth and it sucks. PNG, better in every way, suffers for it.

Re:Sure

[windows]

Well, then you just use MNG [libpng.org] if you need animation. And if you read the linked page, MNG is superior to animated GIFs in a number of ways, one of which is better compression. Another advantage to MNG is it's not necessarily tied to one image format. The individual images can be stored in either PNG or JPEG format.

Personally, I think it's a good thing to have several image formats available with wide support in all browsers. The reason for this is it allows developers to choose which format provides the best results for what they're doing. This means which ones look better and compress better for a certain image. It's definitely a good thing that the patent on GIF is expiring, but it's also a good thing to make sure that PNG doesn't go away, either.

Re:PNG is good

[tanveer1979]

GIF's were already in use from a long time. Even the patents didn't scare ppl because unisys hasnt been relentless in pursuing them.

So people kept on using GIF's. And very few people used PNG. There is a popular saying "Its not what its worth, its how it is marketed"

Re:Part of why PNG hasn't been a big hit

[Hangtime]

It's dead meat.

One thing I hear in here this morning is that its unencumbered and lossless compression format. Yes the format will stick around just because somebody will use it for something. However, I don't need a lossless format that often (if ever) on the web. People aren't downloading your image and sending it to others and your probably not going any further then two-three generations when your working on your website. Finally, size matters ladies! I am not going to clutter up a webpage with a 45K file when JPG and GIF can do it 15K or BETTER! I know because its lossless, however, as I have demonstrated I don't need a lossless format to keep a website maintained because I probably have the original artwork in Adobe Photoshop or TIF format and just save it down to JPEG when I am ready to update the website.

So in conclusion, are we ever going to see PNG as a widespread use format...no. The only problem it solved was one of not using GIF and come 11 days from now, its primary reason for existence will be gone.

Useful... for a different purpose

[Anonymous Coward]

PNG, as the GIF-killer, died long ago. Plagued by poor browser implementations and the popularity of GIFs from the very beginning, it still suffers from those problems today and is very rarely (more like never) used on normal websites.

The only place on the web I've seen PNGs in actual use were web pages talking about the format. Even Slashdot uses GIFs.

However, I do find PNGs very useful -- for an entirely different purpose. I use them as a lossless format for storing original copies of things like digital photographs... basically, the alternative to zipping up a bitmap.

my prediction

[Ender Ryan]

I predict that Microsoft will now soon implement PNG support properly in IE. They MUST have had some kind of deal with Unisys to hold PNG back, in order to keep GIF more relevent, so Unisys could continue trying to sue people. Or it could have been part of a cross licensing deal with Unisys that Unisys forced.

In any case, propping up GIF and therefore Unisys is the only logical reason I can come up with that IE still does not support PNG properly.

Any other guesses?

PNG is an in-use MS Office format

[DrSkwid]

PNG is used as part of MS Office Documents for their binary picture data, so one suspects that making it work in IE will make more things break elsewhere.

Re:Sure

[tbspit]

16,777,216 = 256 * 256 * 256.

Your calculation:
GIF : 256 colors
PNG: 256 * 256 * 256 * 256 (r * g * b * a).
PNG/GIF = 256 ** 3 = 16,777,216.

In fact, PNG supports
65536 * 65536 * 65536 * 65536.
So, using your line of thought,
PNG / GIF = 256 ** 7 = 72,057,594,037,927,936.

Re:problems with PNG

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, in this world, Microsoft IS the standard. Their unstandard formats usually end up replacing whatever standards were there before...

Size

[Duncan3]

libGIF - ~800 lines of code, old as dirt, fast as hell.

vs.

libPNG+zlib+libMNG - ~1.4 MB of compressed unfinished stuff, age and speed low.

Yea, sign me up!

Seriously, anyone still wondering why it's not built into IE when GIF and JPEG and TIFF work so great is just oblivious. Yes, it's awesome, features galore, does things nothing... er.. few... er.. not too many other things already do very well.

Face it, the patent was the whole point. Read the PNG page, the first 3 paragraphs start with "We are better then TIFF because we have less features" and end with "but you're much better off using JPEG and TIFF for most things"...

Re:not yet...

[archen]

That's only sort of correct. A gif can ONLY do transparency. A PNG allows up to 254 levels of partial transparency per channel, and can have multiple channels.

You want to know what REALLY held PNG back? It was Internet Explorer that STILL doesn't do the transparency right. More eople would start using the format right now if the implementation could do what the spec specifies. You see people all the time finding clever ways to make an image look like it blends into the background - which can be a pain in the ass to line up correctly. Imagine if the images could actually do partial transparency... that would make things easier woudn't it? Oh well, it's still a good lossless algorithm to cart images around with - I use it all the time for personal use and on my website.

OT: GIF patch for GD

[vrai]

This site, http://www.rime.com.au/gd/ [rime.com.au], has the patches needed to build a GIF compatible version of GD.

Obviously if you are in a country where the Unisys LZW patent is valid this is illegal, but in eleven days time who's going to care?

Damn Microsoft anyway.

[Millennium]

I wonder if Microsoft's halfhearted support of PNG is deliberate. To be honest, it probably is, in an attempt to undermine open standards.

Ahem. Anyway, PNG is a format which would be superior to GIF in every aspect. Just a few problems...

1) Photoshop's PNG support sucks. It is entirely due to Photoshop that we have this insipid misconception that PNG is larger than GIF; if Photoshop would only compress PNG's decently, people would realize that this is false. Because unfortunately, most people are too lazy to use an optimizer along the lines of pngcrush.

2) IE/Windows' PNG support is awful. As I said, I believe that this is deliberate on Microsoft's part, given that they already have good PNG-handling code (in their AlphaImageLoader filter) and they simply refuse to use it as their default. Now, it is possible to use JavaScript -the scourge of the Net normally, but this is one of those points where it can be genuinely useful- to make IE apply the AlphaImageLoader filter to PNG images, but no one's managed to make a complete drop-in replacement that will apply to all PNG images im a page yet. It can be done, but it hasn't been done yet.

3) MNG support is nonexistent. Even Mozilla, the only browser which ever supported MNG, has removed it. This is a great shame.

Now, in the meantime, there actually is one use for images which PNG is ideally suited for, and where the transparency problems of IE/Win are not an issue: screenshots. The compression is good enough that particularly when dealing with computer-generated images, the file size isn't that much greater than JPEG, but there is no loss in image quality, which is especially important when grabbing screenshots of games or video. Screenshots are not transparent, as a rule, so IE/Windows has no problems. Unfortunately, it seems that this use of PNG has yet to be discovered by the mainstream.

PNG may also be good for certain types of wallpapeers, such as most computer-generated graphics or hand-drawn animation. Colors in these generally aren't as complex as they are in photographs, and the lossless compression of PNG works well under those conditions. Combine this with the fact that JPEG (the current de facto standard for wallpapers) has an inexplicable and yet undeniable hatred for the color red, and you have something which can better preserve these types of images. Worth considering, anyway.

Another angle on PNG support

[FooMasterZero]

Strangely enough i haven't seen this mentioned yet, I would say that PNG has enough support that it is unlikely it will die. I will also say that i am not going to focus on the technical merit contest either, but rather another way people use PNG as i see it.

I say this for 2 fairly good reasons. You can still view PNGs in all major browsers, it really just depends on what kinds of images you are making that will depend on how *good* they look. So if you stick to fairly simple images, a facet for which GIF is/was good for, PNG still is equal among browsers.

Secondly, I feel that PNG has a good foothold is in software development. Programs using some form of libpng seem to use the PNG images very well regardless of how simple or complex they may be. I have seen many a program using PNG for the application e.g. KDE and its childeren. I know I use PNG icons in my applications whenever possible. The two main venues in which i code in support PNG well enough to make my icons look good on screen.

A side note Java (JDK 1.2+) and Carbon support the use of PNG even though Carbon really tries to push tiff's. I do not understand any technical merits of tiff, however i don't like using them because they always seem to be so huge.

PNG Is So Much Better Than PBM, PNM, etc.

[istartedi]

PNG allows up to 16-bits per channel and has full alpha last time I checked. It can store just about anything, and it's non-lossy.

OTOH, you've got the tools that are supposed to allow you to have only 2n image converters, but the interchange formats for that (PPM, PBM, PNM, others?) seem to always have some shortcoming, and they always have to introduce yet another interchange format! PNG does it all in one neat little compressed format.

So forget about scrapping GIF in favor of PNG. Instead, scrap PPM, etc. in favor of PNG. If it doesn't support it already, PNG could be made to support arbitrary bit depth, and arbitrary channels (inverse hyperkinetic bump blending, or whatever you can imagine).

For the web, in most cases, PNG's capabilities don't add much--unless you are doing something really flashy with your website, in which case you probably use Flash, in which case you have nothing meaningful to say so I ignore you anyway. :)

At any rate, PNGs (at least the RGB channels) are properly supported by all the major browsers, so if something happens to compress better in PNG, or if you really need full color depth in a non-lossy image, why not use PNG?

That about sums it up: GIF--color depth not important, crisp lines important, compression important. JPEG--color depth important, crisp lines not important, compression important. PNG--color depth and crisp lines both important, compression not as important (or the image just happens to compress well with PNG).

In some ways, this is a variation on the "better, faster, cheaper" dilemma.

Now, the scenario that favors PNG may be less common, but it's nice to know we can reach for it when we need it.

Well I'll tell you something

[TerryAtWork]

PNG never got a grip on the animation thing.

If you wanted a moving image in a little loop, it was GIF everytime.

PNG could be better?

[dradler]

Even if PNG was a lousy format, it's gotten enough use
that it's here to stay. Fortunately, it's a pretty good
format.

What I wonder is if superior compression techniques, e.g.
LOCO/JPEG-LS will be incorporated into PNG? I was one of
the founders of PNG in 1995, but that was eight years of
technology development ago. Has someone tested PNG
against JPEG-LS in various real world applications?

Re:PNGs

[Alan Partridge]

"Call them idiots, but most people could really give a shit about the computer sitting on their desk."

Try this:

Call them idiots, but most people couldn't really give a shit about the computer sitting on their desk.

You see? It actually makes sense now!

Re:Technical Merits...

[radish]

That works great for "My First Homepage", but it falls flat on it's face for commercial sites. I can't imagine trying to explain to my business sponsors (who pay my wages) that the reason our site looks crappy to 99% of our clients is that we're using a better image format. I may as well just fire myself...

Whilst I agree with you completely in a technical sense (and in an ideal world), you can't lose site of the practicalities - people are not going to switch browser just to view our site - they'll just go somewhere else. It is essential that our site looks how it is supposed to look to the vast majority of clients, and that, alas, means IE5+.

Re:PNG does have animation: MNG

[Skapare]

This decision is what hurt PNG significantly. As we see, there was no migration of animated imaging on the web from GIF to MNG. One reason is there was simply no browser support. And why did PNG take so long to get into browsers? It was developed quick enough, but it should have been in every browser version thereafter. It was not. It took a while before support started to show up. And then, there was no animation. So everyone who wanted to put animated images up had to stay with GIF. I think the PNG folks created a fine piece of technology and failed to promote it properly. And it should have had at least basic animation at a level equivalent to GIF for no other reason than to kill off GIF. But they didn't do that and decide to drag things out, and so GIF did not die.

Re:PNGs

[walt-sjc]

Plenty of commercial environments don't have the resources to update pc's

Then they shouldn't be using them. These are the people that always get viruses, get backdoors installed on their machines so they are DOS nodes, end up as spam relays, etc. If they can't afford Microsoft crap, then they need to install Linux or some other OS. It really isn't that hard to keep your machines up to date.

Seriously, I'm damn near ready to support legislation requiring companies to at least show best-faith effort to secure their networks and keep up with security patches. People that don't are a menace to the rest of us.

Back to the real issue of PNG, if someone can't handle PNG and whines about it, I'd just tell them to upgrade their shit. I don't see any point in coding / working to the lowest ancient common denominator. Doing that restricts you way to much.

Many web sites whine if you are running a really old browser. People that refuse to upgrade (or are just too lazy) will find fewer and fewer sites that function for them. Big examples of this are many banking sites. On this note however, I think it is important for web site designers to adhear to real standards (not just MS proprietary crap) and make sure they can still support non-graphical browsers such as lynx, or screen-readers for the blind.

PNG isn't new, and at this point there is no excuse for any software written within the last 4 years not to support it.

Not out of the box?

[yerricde]

Well, then you just use MNG if you need animation.

What? Should I tell all users of IE not to visit the site until they have the appropriate plug-in to view the advertisements?

Re:PNGs

[Anonymous Coward]

Reasonably modern versions of IE do not support png.

Actually, Microsoft Internet Explorer was among the first browsers to support PNG image formats (infact, Microsoft Internet explorer pages used to brag about it).

I would also like to point out that while Netscape 4.x was refusing to provide any real support for HTML 4.0 and CSS, the corresponding version of Intetnet Explorer did (this was before people were able to use Mozilla without crashing every second or so). Do you know why? Because, MSIE was trying to make it felt that their browser was better, not just freely given away to kill Netscape (although they were, in reality).

But it all stopped once they had attained what they wanted, total monopoly over the Internet client side. There hasn't been any significant improvement (other than strapping proprietary crap such as smart tags, more ActiveX crap, winDRM with keep-other-OS-out technology etc.) since MSIE 6.0.

By the way, I hate IE, and use Mozilla almost exclusively (except when it is shoved down my throat by my School).

Re:Its already moribund

[oever]

The point of an alpha layer in an image on a webpage is that the background of the webpage is visible through the image. A plugin usually does not inherit the background of a webpage, but is often gray, so using a plugin for showing png images with alpha layers will give you the desired effect.

Re:PNGs

[Anonymous Coward]

"Back to the real issue of PNG, if someone can't handle PNG and whines about it, I'd just tell them to upgrade their shit"

And that, son, is why you will never rise above the "Shut up and implement the spec" level of the computing world.

Re:not yet...

[mwood]

[partial transparency]

I'm still trying to figure out why this is considered so important. Pretty, or interesting, yes, but *important*?

Re:Slashdot

[mkettler]

Agreed, it seems highly unusual, if not hypocritical, to "hope that png succeeds" against the gif format and yet use the .gif graphic format on ones own site.

Taco, Hemos, etc, the PNG format won't succeed if people don't USE it. If it is truly and honestly your intention to support the PNG format over the gif format, then put your graphics where your mouth is. In the interim, your well wishes might be in the right place, but will do little or no good in the absence of action.

PNGs work just fine, thank you, even in IE

[David Leppik]

A lot of people have been saying stuff like:

• PNGs may be great, but nobody uses them
• PNGs never caught on because IE doesn't support them
• PNGs will never catch on until M$ supports all their features.
• I can't get PNGs to work

The fact of the matter is, PNGs work great as a drop-in replacement for GIFs. If you limit yourself to what GIFs can do, IE 4.x and Netscape 4.x can use them just fine. And those browsers have just about disappeared from old age.

Of course, if you create a 24-bit PNG to compete with an 8-bit GIF, the GIF will be smaller. Otherwise the PNG will be significantly smaller. If you use gamma correction in the PNG, weird things can happen when people have their gamma misconfigured.

In my own tests a year ago, IE 5.5 on Windows and Mac, as well as Netscape 7 and Mozilla (on Windows, Mac and Linux), all browsers did just fine with 8-bit images, 24-bit images, as well as alpha transparency. That last one is really, really cool looking and everyone should try it.

My theory is that few people use PNGs because most of the HTML books out there recommend GIFs because that's what the authors learned and nobody has bothered to correct them.

More info:

• Browser support [libpng.org]
• PNG test suite [libpng.org], to see if your browser works well for PNGs. If you're using IE, don't take my word that PNGs work
• PNG home page [libpng.org]

Re:Restock Slashcode with PNG icons

[Guy Smiley]

I find it highly ironic that slashdot is such a "pro-OSS" and "anti-patent" site, yet they use GIF instead of PNG images. Talk about hypocritical.

I am so sick of this disinformation....

[Anonymous Coward]

Unisys does not now nor did it EVER own the GIF patent.

One underlying technology of GIF was LZW compression...that was a patented algorithm to Unisys. CompuServe used it as the compression algorithm for GIF, and fell afoul of the patent attorneys.

Re:PNG works in IE to a limited extent

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what's really funny? Microsoft Frontpage (some version, before I started using Linux) came bundled with some Microsoft Image Creator program. That program had support PNGs with transparencies. Talk about Microsoft's left hand not knowing what its right hand is doing.

The problem is that GIF never went away

[rudy_wayne]

PNG never took off because GIF never went away.

Despite all the moaning and gnashing of teeth over the GIF patent, every graphics program produced over the past 15 years, including many shareware programs, has included GIF support. The end result was that people were able to continue creating, editing and using GIF files and the average person never even noticed a problem.

Re:Code to use PNGs in IE in a drop-in fashion

[__aaevmb228]

// The following is hereby placed in the public domain. The right to copy and modify is
// irrevokably granted to all.
// Copyright (c) Daniel Potter

You can't have it both ways. Either it's in the public domain or you retain your copyright. Pick one.

Re:Technical Merits...

[visualight]

Man there's a lot of posts like this.

Commercial websites get a lot of hits. But there are far, far more websites that are not commercial and I think it's those sites that collectively get the most traffic even if individually they each receive only a few hits. The power to change and influence is not just in the hands of commercial websites largely because it's the commercial websites that are the least interesting. Hmmm, what I'm trying to say is while BestBuy.com gets more hits than your MyFirstHomepage, BestBuy.com gets fewer hits than all of the MyFirstHomepages combined. I'm using your term but I'm including all of the MySecond, MyThird, MyFourth, and MyFifthHomepages too.

Please continue to use GIF's for your corporate splash page if you feel you should. But also consider using PNG's on any sites that you produce for yourself.

Re:BMF kicks PNG's sorry arse

[dvdeug]

Have you ever heard of BMF?

Nope. And considering that all I can find on the web is a DOS executable, I'd consider it pretty much worthless.

Re:GIF and PNG are completely different!

[boa13]

The mistaken belief that GIF has a limit of 256 colors probably comes from the way GIF was first used when it came out.

Err, I would say this belief comes from someplace else, like... the GIF specification. GIF has been designed for 256 colors, as the Global Color Table and Local Color Table (which are made a of power-of-two number of entries limited to 256) clearly show.

The site you mention is the homepage for a hack. Yes, a clever dude can create GIFs that look like they have more than 256 colors... but the fact is, such a GIF is made of many 256-colors images. Totally inefficient, compared to PNG, as the author of the hack admits, at the bottom of his page.

That said, there's another well-known GIF hack, which also uses several images per GIF: animated GIF. Let's not forget that, as the spec says, The Graphics Interchange Format is not intended as a platform for animation, even though it can be done in a limited way.

So, let's hope the nightmare doesn't come true, and that horrible multi-image true-color true-Bad GIFs begin to be popular.

PNG is better than GIF in every technical aspect.

GIF Spec: here [msg.net]