Site Graphics and Multimedia Design Forum

However, that said, the day is rapidly approaching when these arguments will fall to the wayside. Give it a year or two and PNG (and MNG) will start becoming the dominant format on the internet.

I will be happy when that day happens, as I am getting very tired of JPG and GIF and the endless patent wars. It's time for this nonsense to stop.

Because of that, if you're going to try using PNG with transparency, I wouldn't recommend doing any fancy multi-level drop shadows... you're liable to end up with some strange results in some unexpected places.

The GIF patent isn't an issue for people like you and me since the liscencing price is already built into the price of the programs - like Photoshop - that we already own.

I dont think the patent issue will move people from jpeg, its imho

1. now more widely used than gif and certainly more widely than png

2. unlikely that for still images the patent will be upheld as it was not enforced for 10 odd years and is efectively in the public domain.

3. as mentioned the claims only have a little while to run anyhow..

4. according to some discussions I read last night subject anyhow to some process called "hoffman" which predates jpeg and jpeg being confused with the "joint... version who really knows what they are using anyhow...

5. Although you say Brett that png are widely supported, how often do you see them in a web page at the moment, I have never seen / noticed a single one .. tiff is also a format available but also big big non lossey as is bmp - perhaps wider implementation of broadband will reduce jpegs demand ..

6. I dont believe the statement that "png are patent free" as one cannot be sure the inventors did not use knowledge that is / was the property of someone else .. or had been registered with a patent which had not yet become public knowledge witness the hyperlink, gif, jpeg .. so in fact if we used that logic it would be better to use something where claimed ownership is almost known than something where there have not yet been any concrete claims to ownership .... because though perhaps more expensive at least we know where we stand..

7. last size .. None of the mage programs I use even export to png, well and none that I have heard of do anything like the size compression jpeg can for a fast loading web page. Size matters - in this case in the reverse to the normal expectation of texans :-)

8. last +1 - it has been commented that the fact that Sony have apparently paid $15m for rights to Forgent is possily more to do with video compression than still images. The patent reads a little more relevant to frame to frame compression with removal of redundancy.. more easy to pressure a company perhaps selling loads of video cameras than one selling stills cameras..

9. You would have thought after being caught out with Polariod patent issues some time ago, Kodak would not have allowed themselves to be caught with jpeg ... I expect they already checked it out .. or deserve all they get

....

Umm, how would you know? Ever right click and view the properties of the logo on this site? Or the "add reply" and "new post" buttons? ;)

Ha ha I guessed as I wrote that there would be some in "obvious" places :-)

Still as your png its 3,016 bytes.
Ulead photoimpact says that as a gif with 40 colours it could be 2,084 bytes Netscape safe and as a jpeg it seems a good image to compress because it could go down to 50% .. wait it even looks pretty good at 30% with YUV411 and standard optimised which takes it to 1,582 bytes.

*Alpha-channel is the only really unique and needed feature, but is also the one with the poorest support.

GIFs and PNGs both offer lossless compression. JPEGS give lossy compression. (That means that when the thing is uncompressed, GIF and PNG produce the original, but JPEG only gives something "like" the original). JPEGs should be used for photographs only, which is what they are designed and optimized for.

From the the PNG FAQ [libpng.org]:

Depending on who you speak to, Netscape still commands 4 - 10% of the browser market. That's a significant enough number that you just can't ignore it...

Testing with 4.0.3 is not a very good verification of what the current version 4.7.9 can do, is it?
Does anyone have a out-of-the-box installation of the most current NS 4.x.x on Windows to test whether it can handle PNG?

The reason I chose version 4.03 is that (IMHO) 4.0 is about the oldest version of Netscape a web developer should reasonably be expected to support. It would be great if everyone using Netscape was running the latest version, but we can't realistically expect that.

Someone who's still using 4.0 could just as well be using 3.x, and I don't care for that one either.

The thing is that many institutions (eg. schools and universities) have a policy of exclusively using something from the 4.x.x family, for security reasons. For the same security reasons, those people are quite likely to keep up to date with the latest version from that family, which makes 4.7.9 very relevant. I still see around 10% of NS 4.x in my logs, and while 4.7.8 currently takes the largest chunk of that, 4.0 is at a very insignificant 0.03%.

One interesting thing was that when I inserted it into a sample page, Dreamweaver MX displayed it as distorted monochrome but preview in browser displayed fine in IE6 and NN4.7

Be careful using transparency unless you want browser compatibility issues. I'm not just talking about alpha transparency here. At low colour depths (8 or lower in my experience) Netscape 4.7 will not display index transparency correctly in certain situations.

With flat colour images, PNGs will usually be significantly smaller in file size than GIFs. As file sizes get smaller, the percentage gain is less, and for files less than 1K GIFs can often turn out smaller. I'm basing this on experience with Firework 3 and 4 - other applications my produce different results.

Again in Netscape 4.7, if you use PNGs as repeating table backgrounds, they might not display at all. This only seems to be an issue when they tile vertically, not horizontally (working from memory here though, so don't quote me).

As noted by a previous poster; Dreamweaver has difficulty displaying PNGs, but only seemingly with low colour depths. You generally see a distorted mono image, and it refuses to pull the dimensions from the graphic. This is a Dreamweaver issue only, and does not affect you actual web page.

What is the line of CSS needed for this workaround? Does it apply to IE6.0 as well?

IE6 provides a lovely brown background to my PNG image, while Opera 6 works great.

Microsoft reference [msdn.microsoft.com]

If you have the Quicktime plugin, it overrides native PNG support when the image is displayed by itself. When it is part of a web page, native PNG support is used.

The Webmaster World logo has 96 colors. But if one were willing to go lossy, it reduces to a 16-color (4 bpp) PNG with a size of 1920 bytes. And it still looks darn good! Examining the image itself, the original graphic probably used 8 colors (black, white, and 6 pastels), with 88 more getting introduced as artifacts of reduction.

Netscape safe? How much of a concern is that nowadays? Just checked tracking logs on 4 of my pages. I guess it is still significant; between 4.2% and 6.5% of the people accessing them are using 8-bit graphics.

On top of this, here are a few (re-calculated) stats from the Google Zeitgeist page:

MSIE 6: 41%
MSIE 5.5: 23%
MSIE 5.0: 22%
Other: 6.5%
NS 4.x: 5%
MSIE 4.0: 2.5 %

Netscape 4.x only manages 5% - while MSIE hogs just under 90% of the browser market!