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 Periodically, someone tells me about the magic of PNG, how it’s the ideal image format for the web, and that someday we’ll all be using it on our sites instead of GIF. People have been saying this for years, and by now most of us have stopped listening. Sadly, flaky browser support has made PNG impractical for almost everything; but now, with a few simple workarounds, we can finally put one of its most compelling features to use. PNG? What? |
Offices & Countries / Armenia
The Portable Network Graphics, or PNG (pronounced “ping”), image format has been around since 1995, having cropped up during the now long-forgotten GIF scare, when Compuserve and Unisys announced they would begin charging royalties for the use of the GIF image format.
To provide GIF support in their applications, software makers like Adobe and Macromedia must pay royalty fees – fees which are passed down to the end user in the selling cost of the software.
When PNG appeared on the scene, web designers were ready to make the switch to the free, superior format and shun GIF forever. But over time, browsers continually failed to support PNG, and eventually most people started to forget about it. Today, nearly everyone still uses GIF habitually.
Which is a shame, because PNG makes GIF look pretty pathetic: it supports gamma correction, (sometimes) smaller file sizes, loss-less compression, up to 48-bit color, and, best of all, true alpha transparency.
To get why alpha transparency is a big deal, we must first understand one of the most annoying limitations of GIF.
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Which is a shame, because PNG makes GIF look pretty pathetic: it supports gamma correction, (sometimes) smaller file sizes, loss-less compression, up to 48-bit color, and, best of all, true alpha transparency. To get why alpha transparency is a big deal, we must first understand one of the most annoying limitations of GIF. |