[ale] GIF vs. PNG vs. MNG vs. JS (was LightScribe for Linux)

[arxaaron]

Meanwhile, back at the PNG Wikipedia page...
<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/PNG_format>

The PNG format didn't get ratified as an ISO/IEC standard
until 2003 (ISO/IEC 15948:2003), which I'm sure was MafiaSoft's
excuse for trying to blockade another Open Public Standard
by not supporting PNG in IE.

Both the MNG and APNG animation extensions of the PNG format
would seem to be depricated:
===
Animation
PNG itself does not support animation at all. MNG is an extension to  
PNG that does; it was designed by members of the PNG Group. MNG shares  
PNG's basic structure and chunks, but it is significantly more complex  
and has a different file signature, which automatically renders it  
incompatible with standard PNG decoders.

The complexity of MNG led to the proposal of APNG by developers of the  
Mozilla Foundation. It is based on PNG, supports animation and is  
simpler than MNG. APNG offers fallback to single-image display for PNG  
decoders that do not support APNG. However, neither of these formats  
is currently widely supported. APNG is supported in Firefox 3.0 and  
Opera 9.5.[16] The PNG Group decided in April 2007 not to embrace APNG. 
[17] Several alternatives were under discussion, ANG, aNIM/mPNG, “PNG  
in GIF” and its subset “RGBA in GIF”.[18]

===

The actual wikipedia page properly links the citations, of course.

peace

aaron





On 2011/06/28, at 19:21 , Pat Regan wrote:

> On Tue, 28 Jun 2011 18:58:16 -0400
> "Michael B. Trausch" <mike at trausch.us> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 2011-06-28 at 18:05 -0400, Pat Regan wrote:
>>> I don't know about PNGs being "far" superior to GIFs.  If it weren't
>>> for animated GIF files I wouldn't have been able to create a
>>> spinning version of my head 10 years ago!
>>>
>>> http://patshead.com/images/mediumhead.gif
>>
>> There is a variant of the PNG container format called MNG that can do
>> animation.
>>
>> Even better, you can have both PNG and JPEG frames in it.
>
> My spinning head, the accompanying domain name, and website predate  
> the
> MNG specification by a few months, though.  I remember being excited
> about the idea of converting to MNG, but by the time there was any
> browser support the idea wasn't on my radar any longer.
>
> I've very recently thought about updating the spinning head with some
> fancy javascript.  Have you ever seen the Mario Galaxy games on the
> Wii?  Your save game icon is a planet in the shape of your Mii head  
> and
> it spins slowly.  If you ware the Wii remote pointer past the planet  
> it
> spins in that direction, and it spins faster the more times (and the
> faster) you do it.  I'm tempted to do the same thing, but I'll  
> probably
> never get around to it.
>
> Pat
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