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Graphics Software Mozilla The Internet

Presenting APNG: Like MNG, Only Better 424

An anonymous reader writes "It's fair to say that most people love PNG images (or at least hate GIFs). However, the one advantage GIFs have over PNGs is that they can be animated. There is, of course, an animated version of PNG, MNG, but few programs can view these images (mainly because the MNG decoder is so large that the likes of Mozilla refuse to include it). But there may be an answer coming: Vladimir Vukicevic and Stuart 'Pavlov' Parmenter (of Mozilla fame) have put together a specification for APNG (Animated Portable Network Graphics)." (Read more below.)

"Unlike MNG, APNG is not a separate file format, but rather an extension to PNG. Thus, APNG images are just normal PNG images (with the .png extension) but can be animated. The system is fully backwards-compatable, so any program that can open a PNG image will be able to open an APNG image (though non-APNG viewers will only show the first frame). Vitally, the decoder just adds an extra few kilobytes onto a standard PNG decoder. APNG support is in the process of being checked into Mozilla. Hopefully, other programs will follow suit."

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Presenting APNG: Like MNG, Only Better

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 28, 2004 @06:49PM (#10099463)
    IE won't support it until 2012, and even then, it'll only support half the features.
    • But it'll add many new ones! Of course the number of new ones will essentially be the same as the excluded ones, but with a better standard.
    • by cbreaker ( 561297 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:36PM (#10099712) Journal
      They'll probably come out with the "WMG" format which you will have to pay for a license to sign your own images. Users that visit your site will contact a Microsoft server and ask if it's okay to decode the images. Only IE will work with this system.

      The official press release would be something like "We feel that this new open (to IE) format will provide the much needed protection against web site theft and give necessary control to Microsoft over your own content."

      Would it surprise you?
    • by Daniel Ellard ( 799842 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:38PM (#10099724)
      IE won't support it until 2012...

      Sarcasm aside, this is a valid point. If IE doesn't support it, most authors won't use it on their web pages, and there aren't any IE updates scheduled any time soon...

      • by josh3736 ( 745265 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @08:57PM (#10100144) Homepage
        Much like regular PNGs as it is.

        I hate the fact that when IE loads my PNGs with alpha it gives it an ugly solid bluish background. You have to hack it [eae.net] just to get my damned images to display correctly in IE. As a result, no one uses regular PNGs.

        • by Ark42 ( 522144 ) <slashdot@morpheu s s o f t w a r e . net> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @09:30PM (#10100296) Homepage


          If you don't want to use the ugly IE5.5+ hack for alpha PNGs, you can at least set the background color setting in the PNG, which IE will use to blend into. I think you can set the background color tag from a pngcrush command line parameter if your software doesn't support that feature.

          For example alpha-msg.png [ark42.com] should show a message written in magenta (the background color) if your browser blends using the background color of the PNG instead of the background color of the page. If your background color is white, you won't see any message if you are using Mozilla/Firefox/Opera. If you put that image in a div with a white background and use a IE5.5+ alpha hack of some sort, the image's message actually makes sense too.

    • and even then, it'll only support half the features

      You optimist ;P
    • by rjch ( 544288 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @10:34PM (#10100594) Homepage
      IE won't support it until 2012, and even then, it'll only support half the features.

      (sarcasm)You think it'll be that quick, do you?(/sarcasm)


      All jokes aside, I wouldn't be so sure of that. If FireFox and Mozilla make as much inroads into the browser market as some people think it will then Microsoft will either have to pull their finger out and keep IE up-to-date and standards-compliant or drop out of the market - something I seriously doubt will happen.


      FireFox is already a long way there. One department at work got so sick of the pop-up infested site they needed to use for some of their work that they demanded something be done about it. Our MIS deparment said nothing could be done until I suggested (and proofed) FireFox. Now it's a standard browser for that department and is being looked at for the rest of the organisation as well.

  • by whiteranger99x ( 235024 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @06:51PM (#10099472) Journal
    how soon will such functionality be implented in major graphic manipulation programs like Photoshop?

    Oh, and yeah, I'm sure someone will make it work with The Gimp, so don't flog me over that detail. :P
  • by screwedcork ( 801471 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @06:52PM (#10099477) Journal
    Microsoft holds the power in their hands as to what file formats become standards. Hopefully they'll make the right decision...
  • WIP (Score:5, Informative)

    by Mekabyte ( 678689 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @06:53PM (#10099480) Homepage
    Discussion can be found here: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=257263
  • Don't hate it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by andyrut ( 300890 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @06:53PM (#10099481) Homepage Journal
    It's fair to say that most people love PNG images (or at least hate GIFs).

    Now that Unisys's patent has expired across the globe, I certainly don't hate GIFs.
    • Re:Don't hate it (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 28, 2004 @06:53PM (#10099490)
      Why not? They're generally bigger than PNG, don't support 24-bit color, 8-bit transparency, etc.
      • Re:Don't hate it (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Ark42 ( 522144 ) <slashdot@morpheu s s o f t w a r e . net> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:03PM (#10099533) Homepage

        I'll give you the transparency (which IE does not support on PNG without gross hacks) but GIF supports infinite colors basically, in increments of 256.
        gif-with-32697-colors [ark42.com]

        • Re:Don't hate it (Score:3, Insightful)

          by damiam ( 409504 )
          And that's not a "gross hack"? It takes eons to load and is 9 times the size of the equivilent PNG.
      • also, using optipng you can make it smaller, so png's are almost always smaller (fair comparison is if they are both 8-bit since that's only what gif supports)
    • Re:Don't hate it (Score:5, Interesting)

      by X_Caffeine ( 451624 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:28PM (#10099662)
      Why not? Alpha blending allows web developers to make fine adjustments to page layouts with necessitating the "recutting" of overlapping layers in Photoshop. It also allows for variance in browser layout without causing visible breaks -- thus Mozilla and KDE don't need to render "exactly" like MSIE down to the last pixel in order for layouts to basically look the same.

      GIF is gunk. Can we step into the 21st century yet?
      • Re:Don't hate it (Score:3, Insightful)

        Why not? Alpha blending allows web developers to make fine adjustments to page layouts with necessitating the "recutting" of overlapping layers in Photoshop. It also allows for variance in browser layout without causing visible breaks -- thus Mozilla and KDE don't need to render "exactly" like MSIE down to the last pixel in order for layouts to basically look the same.

        Yes... now if only MSIE would correctly render alpha transparency in PNGs (without resorting to absurd coding tricks).

  • Animations (Score:5, Funny)

    by Seft ( 659449 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @06:53PM (#10099482)
    Haven't they realised that animated GIFs only serve to irritate?
  • Good to hear (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cyxxon ( 773198 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @06:54PM (#10099493) Homepage

    Well now, this sounds really nice. I have always wondered why MGN never really took off, but then PNG never really took off either (you all know the MSFT story...). Just never knew this had a big-decoder-problem.

    So naturally I was disappointed when Mozilla took out MNG support back then, but this seems to make it better (read: more chances of survival in the real world out there) standard, and that is always a good thing.

    One more reason to finally get rid of all them GIFs, even if they are no longer patent-encumbered - the format is still not capable of alpha transparency...

  • by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @06:57PM (#10099503)
    the MNG decoder is so large that the likes of Mozilla refuse to include it

    Yeah, and a damn good thing too, otherwise we'd have a browser that's so huge and bloated that...

    Nevermind...
    • Do you actualy consider Firefox bloated? Maybe I'm jaded by some of the stuff becoming so big previously that anything less seems to be lean and mean in relation..

      That said, Firefox seems pretty quick to me.
  • by nerd256 ( 794968 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @06:58PM (#10099511) Homepage
    ...no alternative to animated gifs or no IP fines for annoying dancing lemmings and flashing "under construction" pictures?

    ?$!@...@!$?
  • Stupid Question (Score:5, Interesting)

    by slyckshoes ( 174544 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @06:59PM (#10099516)
    This is probably a stupid question, but what are animated gifs used for besides online ads? It seems to me that the animated gif is now an endangered animal found only in annoying online ads, or annoying web-pages that were put together by someone with a rudimentary knowledge of HTML and a free CD of clip-art (or images that they stole from another unattractive site). I would not be sad to see animated gifs (or apngs) disappear entirely. If someone can post a good use of apgns/gifs for which a better solution does not exist, I will humbly retract my opinion and we can all consider this to be have been, indeed, a stupid question.
    • Re:Stupid Question (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Ark42 ( 522144 ) <slashdot@morpheu s s o f t w a r e . net> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:05PM (#10099543) Homepage
      http://sirocco.accuweather.com/nxssa_r1_h_500x620d /r1h/inxr1kgrra_h.gif [accuweather.com]

      This is better then any alternative java or javascript crap I have seen.
      • by Anonymous Coward
        That's great and all, but what about those of us who don't live in Michigan? I mean, we need a file format we can use for our weather, too.
    • by Jonathan ( 5011 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:08PM (#10099555) Homepage
      Java? Flash? I've seen lots of animated gifs in educational contexts -- showing how changing parameters affects a curve, for example. Yes, Java and Flash can be used, although they tend to be sluggish to load and crash browsers not infrequently,
    • Re:Stupid Question (Score:5, Informative)

      by carambola5 ( 456983 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:12PM (#10099570) Homepage
      Weather radar loops. Rather than have the client dl multiple jpegs and sequence them with javascript (eww, javascript), the client need only download a single apng.

      For an example, check out weather.com's "map in motion" for your locale. Then, check the source of the page. Much cleaner to simply have an <img> tag.
      • It maybe much cleaner in the browser, but it depends on your implementation. Is it cleaner to have an automatically created file in a format that may be lacking in support or to animate a set of images which can have all the features you could want in each since the format iself doesn't have to anything to do with animation? If my server needs to compute a lot while serving animations I would at least offload the animation script to the client. If my server isn't actually computing anything I can spare the
      • Re:Stupid Question (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Saeger ( 456549 )
        Rather than have the client dl multiple jpegs and sequence them with javascript

        You don't have to use javascript to sequence jpegs for an animation effect. You can instead stream a recorded or live "jpeg video" by using the 'multipart/x-mixed-replace; boundary=xxxfoobarxxx' mime-type with a frame delay between the boundary. The downside is that you need to keep a persistant connection open to the webserver for the duration of the vid.

        This isn't commonly done anymore, but it is how the first postage-stamp

        • Re:Stupid Question (Score:3, Informative)

          by FyRE666 ( 263011 ) *
          [x-mixed-replace]
          This isn't commonly done anymore...

          Probably the biggest reason being that IE on Windows doesn't support it (surprise, surprise)...
    • I've seen talk about using them for themes in Mozilla. Don't forget that though animated screams flashy images, you can simply think of it as a collection of states for a feature. For example, a single image could contain graphics for ready, busy and error states.

      Whether that is of any use is another matter :)
      • For example, a single image could contain graphics for ready, busy and error states.

        Good point. OS X did this with PDFs for things like the dock 'poof' effect and various menu item states (airport signal, battery, etc). Not sure if they're still using them or not, since that was in the 10.0 and 10.1 days...
    • Re:Stupid Question (Score:2, Interesting)

      by grm_wnr ( 781219 )
      Actually, an animated .gif is the only animation format you can just put into an tag. That makes a huge difference if you are working with systems that don't allow you to write plain HTML. Web forums, for example. Or picture upload sites. And many people think animations are great, even if some don't like them at all. So the need for animated .gifs is there - and right now, there is no alternative.
    • Re:Stupid Question (Score:4, Informative)

      by stienman ( 51024 ) <.adavis. .at. .ubasics.com.> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:39PM (#10099733) Homepage Journal
      It's great for simple process visualizations.

      Check out uncommon or odd designs for engines [keveney.com], which would be very difficult to imagine from a text description with a few small pictures.

      There are others - google search animated gif "subject" to find useful illustrations for any process.

      -Adam
    • Re:Stupid Question (Score:4, Insightful)

      by epine ( 68316 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @08:01PM (#10099857)

      That's not a stupid question at all. If Firefox had a setting (that I knew about) to disable all animation effects by default, I'd enable that feature immediately. More than 90% of animated content out there is crap or worse than crap. 100% of animated effects reduce my reading speed and comprehension. I've asked other people about this, and I seem to suffer this effect more than most people, to the extent that I often set my Firefox font size for inch tall letters so that the majority of the text spills below the aggravating imagery. Sometimes if I can't get the animation away from the text I'm readin, I actually hold one hand over the screen to block out the offending flicker. The few people I know who find this similarly annoying tend to be the exceptional readers. One of my close friends claims he sees every word on the printed page (for book reading) simultaneously, and he moves his eyes back and forth mostly for the purpose of getting the words into proper order for mental comprehension. But he usually knows what the author will claim before he gets there, because he knows what words are coming at the bottom of the page.

      For me, there is no "experience" involved in visiting a web page. I go there to suck out the content. I had a jazz musician friend in Montreal who said that he didn't much care if an LP had a gouge the size of the grand canyon, if the performance had "wit" he didn't even hear the clicks and pops. I feel the same way about text. All I'm there to do is discover whether the author has a moment of wit or substance.

      What I've learned about reading, serious reading where the aim is not to hear your own thoughts expressed by another person (or believe such), but to encounter thoughts that clash and spark and scrape the paint, to accomplish this the reader must open an expressway of comprehension that bypasses the internal thought police, the slow border crossings with open trunks and snuffling dogs. It seems to me that people who read at the pace of their own internal mind police do not experience the same distress I feel about the visual flickers of animated content: it's only slowing their visual processing down to the same speed their emotional filters were functioning in the first place.

      My reading style is that I'm a kind of ambulance chaser: I want the content to strike the rock bottom content of my soul in massive wreckage, trailing ambulances, autopsies, coroner's reports, and sprawling cemeteries full of petty self justifications, RIP.

      APNG I can live without.
      • Re:Stupid Question (Score:5, Informative)

        by iabervon ( 1971 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @08:13PM (#10099925) Homepage Journal
        Go to about:config, find image.animation_mode, and set it to "no". I actually set mine to "once", which means that I see animated images if I'm actually watching; I generally iconify the browser and do something else while pages load, so I miss all the ads, but I can actually watch a weather image if I want. As far as I can tell, there's no documentation for this anywhere.

    • If someone can post a good use of apgns/gifs for which a better solution does not exist, I will humbly retract my opinion and we can all consider this to be have been, indeed, a stupid question.

      How about as an alternative format for movie encoding instead of divx? :)

      Sorry, I just had to say it.

      MGV
  • LZW? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    well now that the lempel-ziv-welch algorithm patent has expired, maybe they should look into whether or not this algorithm could be used for a better *PNG format.
  • Hate gif? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by scheme ( 19778 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:04PM (#10099538)
    It's fair to say that most people love PNG images (or at least hate GIFs).

    Most people don't know what png images are and they probably couldn't care less whether they get png or gif images.

  • Size? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:05PM (#10099546)
    ...(mainly because the MNG decoder is so large that the likes of Mozilla refuse to include it)

    So large that even Mozilla won't include it, you say?

    Uh huh.

    Ooookay...

    *eyes >10MB binary while whistling*
  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:07PM (#10099552)
    most people love PNG images (or at least hate GIFs)

    Uh, no. Most people have no freakin' clue about what PNG and GIF are. Only we geeks know or care about the difference.

    And speaking as a fellow geek, if you're feeling emotions like "love" and "hate" over freakin' image formats you really need to get out of the house more often.

  • by rmdir -r * ( 716956 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:11PM (#10099563)
    Y'all are missing something. The browser market is dominated by IE, and, if I remember correctly, IE doesn't even support non-animated PNG's perfectly. What are the chances that APNG gets added? And if it doesn't get added, what web designer will use a format that can't be viewed by 93% of their users? I'm not trolling, I'm not dissing Moz, but the reality of the market is there...
  • animated? (Score:5, Funny)

    by carpe_noctem ( 457178 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:12PM (#10099571) Homepage Journal
    However, the one advantage GIFs have over PNGs is that they can be animated.

    Surely I am not the only one here to disagree with this statement.... !
  • by enosys ( 705759 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:14PM (#10099582) Homepage
    The story begins with: "It's fair to say that most people love PNG images (or at least hate GIFs)." No, it's not fair to say that; it's wrong. Most computer users don't even know the difference and don't care as long as they can see the image. Most people don't know about the GIF patent issues and anyways GIF is now free. Plus why hate a file format? If you really want to hate something then hate what Unisys did.
  • MNG includes the super duper cool JNG [libpng.org]

    JNG test-suite [libmng.com]
  • by pez ( 54 ) * on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:17PM (#10099599) Journal
    Web developer has been my full-time job since 1995, and I have tried *so many times* to switch to PNG. And every single time, I slowly (and unfortunately) end up reverting back to GIF.

    The two reasons that PNGs are unsuitable for large-scale use are:

    * MSIE support sucks. It is getting better, but it still sucks (yes, I know this is a Microsoft issue not a PNG issue, but I'm not trying to place blame here.)

    * Gamma value variation. Look at a PNG on one browser, and the blue value will match #0000CC, but look in another browser on another OS, and IT WON'T! Talk about maddening... this is one situation where the extra control by having the ability to specify a gamma value is a curse, not a blessing.

    Yes, I know there are workarounds for both of thses issues. But the fact that they are both fatal flaws, and both have to be worked around, makes PNGs unusable for every-day use.
    • by jesser ( 77961 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:29PM (#10099673) Homepage Journal
      MSIE support sucks. It is getting better, but it still sucks

      I don't see how MSIE's lack of alpha-transparency could stop you from using PNGs, since you use GIFs now.
    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:55PM (#10099814)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • MSIE support sucks. It is getting better, but it still sucks

      Huh? In what way is IE support for PNG worse than for GIF?

    • by UnConeD ( 576155 )
      Your two problems are easy to get around.

      1) IE does support transparent PNG, you just need a CSS hack for it. There are tons of scripts around the web to include the hack automatically, one of which is the 'IE7' DHTML behaviour which fixes a lot more than just PNG transparency, and which anyone who wants to do modern webdesign (semantic and tableless) should consider.

      2) If you simply omit the gAMA chunk from your PNGs (pngcrush can do this easily, plus you get tiny PNGs to boot), then the gamma issues wil
  • by Anonymous Coward
    The article says it's because it's too big, but that's hard to believe, coming from the Mozilla camp. Does anyone have more details? I've been wondering for a while why this hasn't shown up in any of the free browsers. Also, I wonder how SVG relates to APNG. SVG seems like a great format for distributing scalable and moving things, although it's not a bitmap format.
  • A bit OT (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Enrico Pulatzo ( 536675 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:25PM (#10099635)
    First off, I know all about the drama surrounding IE's PNG support. Secondly, I think those that gripe about it to Microsoft pretty much gripe in vain (at least for now). Thirdly, at least on my work computer, IE uses Quicktime to render PNG files. This leads me to conclude that we, the concerned few should ask Apple to make Quicktime for Windows support PNG's alpha channels. As we do this, we can ask Apple to add support for this APNG format too.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • If you can't do the animation with a gif, now days people jus use flash.
  • MNG as a format (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:38PM (#10099722)
    MNG is as far as I can see the _only_ format suitable for an Amiga-DPaint-workalike in this day and age (no good one exists today except for the astronimically-priced Windows TVPaint/Mirage [tvpaint.com], and that is a direct descendant of Amiga TVPaint).

    APNG looks too lightweight, missing many features necessary to replace the ancient (but still in use!) Amiga-IFF-ANIM. Sure, it's a replacement for shitty animgifs. But can it replace the Amiga-IFF-ANIM7 roughs for a feature-length cartoon?

    Yes, much of the industry now uses vector animation (i.e. macromedia's stuff), but bitmapped animations are much easier to seamlessly integrate with bitmapped digitised film. Want a(nother) open source killer app? Take the cinepaint/gimp engine, add a dpaint-like interface and MNG support and lots of bitmap-animation-creation-and-editing features, and several animation companies I know can finally lose their old big-box Amiga stockpiles...

    • Re:MNG as a format (Score:2, Informative)

      by sppavlov ( 809156 )
      We were only aiming to replace animated GIFs. MNG does have some interesting properties which may make it more useful for things like this, however it has been my experiance talking to web developers that the thing they really want is a small fast easy to use animated GIF replacement.
  • by slashname3 ( 739398 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:38PM (#10099723)
    Microsoft recognizes that a new animated image format was needed (after seeing it mentioned on /.). As such they have announced the release of a new standard, Microsoft Extended Sequential Series (MESS).

    MESS will be incorporated into Longhorn and will be one of the major enhancements to the Microsoft operating system. The MESS graphics format will permit content providers to render highly complex images on a users system. The MESS format allows use of Active X components which permits all kinds of interesting effects on a users system.

    When asked about using existing standards executives at Microsoft responded that no other standard in this area exists. Patents have been applied for covering this novel concept and will be agressively defended. Anyone trying to duplicate the intelectual property of Microsoft would be better off using MESS as long as they pay the royalties due Microsoft or they may find them selves in an even bigger MESS.

    Executives were then asked about possible security implications of the new MESS protocol. Executives replied that security is a number one priority and that an updated SP3 patch is currently in the works that will address all security issues. The only thing holding up SP3 release is final release of SP2 patch 1 that is needed to address security issues caused by various linux distributions.
  • Header size (Score:4, Informative)

    by maxence ( 59402 ) <`moc.ecnex4m' `ta' `ecnexam'> on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:49PM (#10099781) Homepage
    the one advantage GIFs have over PNGs is that they can be animated

    Another advantage GIF has over PNG is its smaller header size which makes small images lighter. A typical 16x16 GIF icon weighing about 100 bytes will translate into a PNG of 200 bytes or more.

    That may sound like nitpicking but it can still matter, for example when transferring images to mobile phones.

    • Re:Header size (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 28, 2004 @09:02PM (#10100171)
      You're exaggerating a little, I think.

      Experiment #1: 1x1 white pixel. Results: GIF 35 bytes; PNG 67 bytes.

      Experiment #2: typical Slashdot icon [slashdot.org] resized to 16x16. Results: GIF 282 bytes; PNG 277 bytes.

      I don't see the header size making a huge difference. What does make a moderate difference is that PNG is not bound to 256 colours. You can use a 16-colour palette, in which case pixels are packed in 4 bits each. You can use a 4-colour palette, in which case pixels are packed in 2 bits each. Pixels can be of many different depths between 1 bit and 48 bits. GIF does not have this flexibility.

      This is important because icons very rarely use more than 16 colours. PNG gives a win in these cases.

      • Re:Header size (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        What does make a moderate difference is that PNG is not bound to 256 colours. You can use a 16-colour palette, in which case pixels are packed in 4 bits each. You can use a 4-colour palette, in which case pixels are packed in 2 bits each. Pixels can be of many different depths between 1 bit and 48 bits. GIF does not have this flexibility.

        Just FYI, GIFs can have 4-color or 16-color palettes [ibm.com].

  • by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @07:58PM (#10099832) Homepage
    The whole reason for PNG's creation was as a response to the potential doom spelled by the enforcement of GIF patents and of course they took the opportunity to improve on the limitations of GIF as well... but was back in the day, in the very beginning, I assumed that the PNG specification would include animation as part of PNG's purpose.

    I think the best answer here would be to enhance the existing PNG specification just as GIF's original specification was enhanced to include animation. Let's not call it "*.APNG" or "*.MNG" for that matter. It should still be called *".PNG" just as *.GIF always remained.

    I think it would be a mistake to add to the ever-increasing number of filename extensions that exist out there. Isn't this convention a part of DOS and CP/M's legacy anyway? Filename extensions are handy information to append but only to a point.
    • ....oops....

      I made an assumption that wasn't correct. Forget I wrote anything about filename extensions... clearly their plan is exactly what I suggested. So their wisdom is at least as good as my own if not better. Who is the keeper of the PNG format? What would it take to correct the obvious ommisions from the first specification? This enhancement should indeed be added.
    • by sppavlov ( 809156 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @08:34PM (#10100021)
      APNG files _are_ PNG files. We didn't create a whole new format (since that would be silly) so APNG files will still be .PNG files. The first frame in an APNG file looks to current PNG decoders to just be a regular PNG. The APNG spec specifies some additional chunks that if found tell an APNG aware decoder how to find the rest of the frames.
    • Several people tried to get animation in the original PNG standard, but they were rebuffed because it would take too long. Most of the energy that could have gone to getting a simple animation mechanism out was spent on generating really cool interlacing so that when you downloaded PNGs over your 9600 baud dial-up they'd fade in nicely.

      I admit that I thought the interlacing was kind of cool myself: I had a 9600 baud dial-up at the time.

      I lost interest in the process and left the PNG list after the MNG gro
  • I love png, their only drawback being the lack of a lightweight animation mthod (which mng certainly is not) until now. How did it take 6 years to come up with such a simple solution?

  • by inflex ( 123318 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @08:23PM (#10099971) Homepage Journal
    I just took a look at the 'specification' and I think it's a great one.

    It's not overly complex, it's backwards compatible and it's easy to implement.

    It probably will lack some features which would be nice but at the moment I don't see them being spoken about in the specification (ie, what mode of application for the next frame, OR/AND/XOR/INVERT etc).

    I think with it being as simple as it is to create an APNG from existing PNG's, we could see this format take off a lot faster than MNG. Now it's simply a matter of waiting for Firefox/Mozilla/Opera to pick up their end and make use of the APNG format.

    PLD.
  • It takes years for browsers to fully support any new standard, so APNG will be more obsolete than it already is by the time IE has full support.

    We already have Flash, which is capable of far more than the APNG format will be.

    If you don't have Flash, then you can animate PNG's (or JPG's) by using a javascript [enter.net]. Doing it this way means you don't have to worry about incompatibility with the APNG format.

    Yeah, the W3 needs to implement a decent animated bitmap format, but the implementation process takes way t
  • Rather Pointless... (Score:3, Informative)

    by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Saturday August 28, 2004 @10:15PM (#10100510) Journal
    I was quite interested in using MNG... Not for web images, but actually as a rather good lossless video codec. MNG would make a great codec, and it's already supported by Ogg... You can mux a MNG image into an ogg file (with audio) using oggmerge, available via cvs...err...I mean svn.

    Unfortunately, it seems that there is almost no MNG software available that supports delta encoding (eg. storing only the difference between sequential images), so if you take (10) 100K PNGs, you get a 1,000K MNG. No space savings, no point really. That is where MNG really falls behind GIF.

    It seems mostly pointless, to me, to introduce a new, very similar spec. Backwards compatibily is nice, but not all that necessary, as evidenced by PNG in the first place. In any case, APNG certainly can work where MNG failed, if only good software comes out for it. It's more likely that MNG will get properly advanced software first, but you never can tell.

    As for MNG not being in Mozilla, well that is a strange issue... libMNG supports PNG rendering, so if there were more than a nominal number of MNGs on the web, you might have seen libPNG removed instead. However, since you don't see many MNGs, there wasn't much point to keeping it.
  • Animated JPEGs? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Air-conditioned cowh ( 552882 ) on Sunday August 29, 2004 @01:54AM (#10101170)
    Anyone thought of this? Often animated gifs are used to animate photos. This is probably not the best way to do it and APNG won't help unless it supports some kind of lossy compression.

    Is it possible to implement little motion-JPEGs in a browser without it adding too much code?

    Just asking.

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