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?

GO IBM!

Do it for the common good. Aside from business, really what open source is for!

No, they use this in the SCO case

UnixWare's compress program (for *.Z files) is
infringing on this patent.

Indeed they do.

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 [groklaw.net].

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.

If the poster is correct

and png truly is a better standard why should geeks care what happens to gif?

Re:If the poster is correct

Well, one reason is that, once-upon-a-time, we had to build apps for browsers that didn't support .png, so even though we could handle .pngs, we had to consider our clients who were stuck with .gifs. Thankfully, even the lowliest [microsoft.com] of browser almost supports .png these days.

not even close!

IE does not support the #1 most useful aspect of PNG, namely, alpha transparency. Without alpha transparency, you may as well use JPEG or GIF in most circumstances.

Indeed, the web would be much more beautiful if IE supported alpha transparency in PNGs.

Re:not even close!

Some people don't have the option to live in an ideological world and must live in a realistic one.

Elsewehere in this thread I've mentioned that I continue to use .gifs, because it's not realistic to ditch them. Regardless; I'd hardly descibe my position as "ideological" or "unrealistic" - it's one based on:

1. Portable Network Graphics work with all major browsers - now (IE doesn't support one area of PNGs, but it doesn't lose any functionality over GIFs, as GIFs don't provide 8-bit alpha-blending anyway);

2. GIFs may - as this article is about - still be patent-encumbered.

In what way is promoting increased use of PNGs unrealistic?

Re:oh well....

You do realize we were talking about a file format for displaying images, right? You sound like you're willing to lay your life down for the cause of alpha transparency!

Re:not even close!

you were implying that we should go ahead and use the uber-PNG features, and then wait for IE to catch up to see them.

Indeed, and why not? An image is just an image in IE; who cares if only 5%, 6%, 7% (and rising) of the browsing population see it as it was intended? It'll be visible in all its glory once IE 7 is available, or once punters start making the switch to more modern browsers. In the meantime IE users won't be adversely affected, and it might even prompt them to drag themselves into the 21st century, browser-wise.

Re:not even close!

Switching to PNG because 5% or browsers will benefit is the unrealistic part.

Well, all browsers, including IE, can use PNGs. I presume you're refering to alpha-blending, which IE can't - currently - use? Use of non-IE browsers is steadily rising, as support for IE seems either non-existent or focused on "IE7" or whatever it'll be called. This suggusts - to me - two things:

1. Increasing numbers of people are using browsers - now - that do support alpha-blending;

2. The next iteration of IE is likely to support alpha-blending and is probably due soon (maybe soon like Longhorn, but soon, anyway...);

Either way, catering for the present-and-the-not-too-distant future doesn't seem that unrealistic.

Re:not even close!

...then what's stopping you from using it? 5% or browsers will benefit;

Because when you're working on a corporate project that costs money, it's very difficult to put a business case forward for something which will only be of benefit to a very small number of visitors.

Most clients would rather pay for something that directly benefits the browsing experience of the other 95%.

IE only has an 80% market share -- and shrinking.

According to the stats at this link [w3schools.com] (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.

Re:in any case

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?

Re:in any case

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 [mozilla.org] in anything but IE (I tested it with Mozilla and Opera) to see some 8-bit alpha. And a cool little demo to boot.

Re:in any case

It supports PNG enough as to substitute GIF in any case.

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.

Re:in any case

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.

Getting alpha transparency to work in IE

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.

Transparency not a *required* part of PNG

Its become received wisdom the IE6 sux for (among other reasons) "not supporting PNG".

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.

Re:If the poster is correct

PNG transparency works just fine in Internet Explorer. It's just a pain in the ass.

This website [eae.net] will tell you how to turn it on. You can see it working on my website.

No idea why it's not on by default, but if it works...

Re:If the poster is correct

Because GIF is used MUCH more, so people writing software that make use of images in general (browsers, image editors, etc.) have to deal with this patented algorithm, or risk losing users because their software doesn't support one of the most widely used formats.

Re:If the poster is correct

GIF is pronounced JIF.

Bob Berry, the developer of CompuShow for CompuServe (remember them - the people that invented the GIF format?) included with it an animated GIF89 format file that had a picture of him. It had a speach bubble with him saying:

Oh, incidentally, it's pronounced "JIF"

A quick google later and I've found a web site which has this, and other evidence that .GIF files are pronounced JIF

http://www.olsenhome.com/gif/

Thanks for playing

Re:If the poster is correct

It's hard to do away with GIF because GIF's are animated. PNG's are not. There's the MNG standard, which is basically an animated PNG, but it isn't widely supported yet.

Re:If the poster is correct

> Is there a legitimate practical use for animated gifs that I am missing?

Two issues with this:

1. THe fact that you cannot imagine a practical use doesn't mean there isn't one.

2. Seeing the popularity of flash to create animated advertisements, banners and such, there may not be a 'need', but defintiely a very strong wish to use such things.

MNGs (Animated PNGs) and Mozilla

Mozilla used to support MNGs, but that support was removed in orther to reduce "cruft".

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)

Re:If the poster is correct

Quick source view of the main slashdot page shows that "gif" is found about 50 times.

"png" is found twice -- both of which are related to the original post.

Now you know why we care. The web community uses gif more than png. For better or worse...

Davak

Re:If the poster is correct

There are many "better" things that, for whatever reason, just aren't as popular compared to other "inferior" things.

The PNG and GIF situation is like the OGG and MP3 situation. Sure, OGG may be better, but everyone already knows what MP3 is, has all their songs in MP3 format, has programs that know what do wo with MP3s, has players that know what MP3s are, etc. etc.

Re:If the poster is correct

Except the browsers all support PNG (minus alpha, but GIF and JPG don't have that anyway), where as most MP3 players can't play Vorbis..

Why do we need GIF anymore?

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.

Re:Why do we need GIF anymore?

Yes, because what we really need is alpha-transparent flashing adverts!

Re:Why do we need GIF anymore?

Alpha transparency is critical to good Web site design for many reasons. Among them:

1. Blending with any background means you can change the background globally and not worry about re-blending all of the images.
2. An image which is produced externally (e.g. by a partner) can blend with your layout cleanly without being customized.

However, MOST uses of alpha blending in web design would ACTUALLY be better done in SVG if SVG in browsers could finally get first-class status.

Why? Well, just for starters, LCDs and CRTs have different optimial anti-aliasing strategies. If I want to put a circle on a Web page, right now I have to choose one of those strategies ahead of time (or resort to a plug-in). If we allow SVG "images", then we can simply render that circle however the user directs it to be (presumably because they've selected a "CRT-friendly" or "LCD-friendly" preference in their browser or desktop).

Once you eliminate anti-aliasing as a concern, there are still reasons to do alpha-blending in regular images (such as those above), but the general case (logos, text, shapes, etc) will be handled more cleanly.

Re:Why do we need GIF anymore?

Alpha transparency is critical to good Web site design ...

The quality of a web site is determined more by it's substance than by it's appearance.
Good web site design doesn't even require images.

Alpha blending is not critical.
It's nice, but IMO it's ranks below "spell checker" in the hierarchy of good web site design tools.

-- less is better.

Re:Why do we need GIF anymore?

What he meant is that alpha-blending is important in making consistent, standards-compliant pages. In other words, although it's possible to hack around it by pre-blending your images, but you have to re-blend them every time the background changes color. For example, what if you wanted to let the user choose the background color as an accessibility measure (i.e. a normal version and a high-contrast version)? There's no good way to do that without alpha-blended PNGs; you'd have to resort to javascript.

It's like CSS for positioning: you don't need it (you could use tables instead), but it makes for better design, because you can separate content from presentation. PNG is like this because then the image is "my_logo.png" rather than "my_logo_over_white_background.gif", "my_logo_over_black_background.gif", "my_logo_over_blue_background.gif", "my_logo_over_puke_green_background.gif",
"my_log o_over_orange_and_purple_polka_dots.gif", etc.

Re:Why do we need GIF anymore?

Everything which supports modern CSS styling supports PNG... it's just not everything supports all the features of PNG, the most noted case being IE doesn't support alpha-transparency.

Many people also believe PNG's to generally produce larger images to GIF, if youre generating PNG's using the 'recomended settings' then yes for many images this is the case, but if your image doesn't need 16.7 milion colors and full alpha-transparency, don't enable them switch to pallete based with no-transparnecy.

Re:Why do we need GIF anymore?

Actually, I think the reason most people think pngs produce larger filesize images is that most professional graphics bods use photoshop, which, despite being a fantastic bit of software, is shit at optimising pngs.

The GIMP does a much better job of it.

Re:Why do we need GIF anymore?

Compatibility. A huge number of existing web sites still use GIF as their primary image format. We need to be able to produce software that can manipulate these images if we want any hope of penetrating the web authoring market. This has prompted many workarounds in the past (such as libungif, a piece of software that produces GIF files without using the patented algorithm -- but unfortunately this means not having any compression) which will become obsolete once all patent issues have been cleared up.

This is cause for celebration.

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?

Re:This is cause for celebration.

The original Welch paper is pretty readable:

Terry A. Welch, "A Technique for High Performance Data Compression", IEEE Computer, Vol. 17, No. 6, 1984, pp. 8-19.

If you don't want to go to a library and look that up, then Google will find you about 12000 hits on "Welch LZW", and the first few all seem to be exactly what you want.

Re:This is cause for celebration.

the whole ruckus was because they did publish the algorithm widely and it got used widely - and only then did they reveal their submarine.

the algo is/was very widely known.

Why should we care

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 [slashdot.org]

Not in the old days

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.

The other patent should constitute prior art

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

Re:IBM is NOT friendly

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.

Obligatory Troy ref.

Beware of Geeks bearing GIF's

Chest Thumping

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.

PNG

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>

Re:PNG

See http://www.daltonlp.com/daltonlp.cgi?item_type=1&i tem_id=217 [daltonlp.com] for how to get pngs to display transparency on IE 5.5 and IE 6. This is now a well-known technique that works pretty well universally. Combine with CSS or javascript and you should be able to use pngs entirely.

Re:PNG

I feel your pain.

Too bad all the exploits I wrote have failed to convince people to switch to functional web browsers and rid the world of MSIE once and for all.

Or maybe I shouldn't have said that.

LZW tiff, too

Does this mean we can get LZW compression back in libtiff [libtiff.org] too, then? It would be really nice to be able to supply compressed press-ready images to printing houses.

Yeah, I know there are deflated TIFFs, but they can be like "wha...?" in the prepress world.

jamie needs to hit the books.

So how about it, IBM? You've got nothing to lose!

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.

Re:jamie needs to hit the books.

"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."

I traded email with several people who know the history of this algorithm and its patents fairly well. I wasn't able to get a quote from a legal expert backing this up by press time, but it hardly matters because this opinion indeed is the consensus of those I have talked to. And I mentioned the duplicate-patent issue to an IBM PR rep, who had plenty of time but didn't offer a correction.

I stand by what I wrote.

Am I missing something?

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.

IBM isn't going after anybody..

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.

SCO v IBM - This Patent Is Being Actively Used

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?

Actually that patent is being used in IBM's (second amended) counterclaims [groklaw.net] in the SCO v IBM case.

Re:SCO v IBM - This Patent Is Being Actively Used

This is true. It is counterclaim #175:

175. IBM is the lawful owner, by assignment, of the entire right, title and interest in United States Patent No. 4814746 ("the '746 Patent"), duly and legally issued on March 21, 1989 to Miller et aI., entitled "Data Compression Method". A copy of the ' 746 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit X.

176. Upon information and belief, SCO has infringed, contributorily infringed and/or actively induced others to infringe the '746 Patent within this judicial district and elsewhere in violation of35 U. C. 9271 by, without authority or license from IBM, (a) making, using, selling and/or offering to sell products, including Unix Ware and Open Server, that practice one or more claims of the '746 Patent and (b) actively, knowingly and intentionally causing and assisting others to infringe one or more claims of the' 746 Patent.

While it would be nice for IBM to release the patent to the public domain, they would have to drop this particular claim from the SCO lawsuit if they did.

Re:SCO v IBM - This Patent Is Being Actively Used

While it would be nice for IBM to release the patent to the public domain, they would have to drop this particular claim from the SCO lawsuit if they did.

I'm not sure that's true, but IANAL. The current status of the patent probably has little to do with the status of the patent at the time of infringement.

It would probably reduce the amount of damages but would still achieve the primary purpose of making SCO burn through cash. We all know [or at lwast strongly suspect] that the total damages to IBM by SCO will far exceed the value of SCO...

IE can work with PNG

Just use Sleight [youngpup.net] to make PNG transparency work with IE on your site.

PNG vs. JPEG

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?

Re:PNG vs. JPEG

No. JPEG at max quality looks perfect to the human eye, but it still has differences from the original image. Lossy compression should be avoided in situations where images are going to be decoded and recoded many times, as these errors build up to the point where they can become noticeable.

Also: make sure your PNG encoder is configured correctly. In most cases you want to be using the 'adaptive' filter.

Re:PNG vs. JPEG

I'll bite.

JPEG, like MPEG (and Vorbis, Theora, ...) changes an image in such a way that humans don't percieve the difference, but it can be stored more efficiently. At lower qualities, you will begin to notice some artifacts. It can go all the way down to a completely useless collection of pixels. It's a common misconception that 100% quality JPEG images are not distorted in any way. I don't know what 100% means, other than the lowest compression your encoder supports.

PNG images, on the other hand, encode the image exactly as it looks. Basically, a PNG image is a collection of pixels, some metadata, optionally compressed with deflate (same algorithm used by gzip).

JPEG images are the better choice for photograpic images (which is what they are intended for), where the exact pixel colors don't matter that much. PNG is better for line drawings, text, high contrast images; basically anything that doesn't bear slight changes to the colors. For large images, JPEG can be significantly smaller, making the case for using JPEG for screen dumps and such.

Alpha-Transparency

So people know what an "alpha-transparency is" -- it's this very beautiful flower [swri.edu]... which is also on this page [libpng.com], unless you're using IE, in which case it's just blank. Some examples are also available here [tephras.com]. Basically it's just a much nicer version of GIF's transparency.

LZW is USEFUL and NON-OBVIOUS

It never really bothered me that these compression algorithms were patented.

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.

hmm.

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.

Intimidated?

When the submarine patent surfaced ten years later, its new owner Unisys intimidated developers and web authors into moving away from GIFs

Not very well I hasten to add, GIF's are still used rather a lot [google.com] and even Slashdot hasn't bothered to convert all their images to PNG.

Improved JPEG compression possible, too!

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

what do you mean by 'better standard'?

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 [libmng.com] them yet. JNG doesn't seem to be supported [libmng.com] by my fancy browser either.

It expired a year ago in the US anyway!

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. "

How do you pronounce "gif"?

Found this on Usenet [google.com], proving that geeks have too much time on their hands:

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!

this is me going off topic

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.

PNG Standard Hypocrisy

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.

sue anyone that uses GIF

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.

Re:GIF sucks. Move on.

You're talking about an obsolete technology [GIF] that nobody cares about.

I'd question that. Check Google images [google.com] 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".

Re:PNG's.....

You can't make animations with PNG files....

Sure you can, only the result is called MNG [libpng.org].

Except from what I've understood...

...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

Re:PNG's.....

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.

Animations...

And this is a bad thing?

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).