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Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla Adds MNG Support 99

Posted by emmett from the animated-lizard dept.
HoserHead writes: "For those who are really worried about the Unisys patent on LZW compression in GIF files, the answer may soon be at hand: MNG is on the way. PNG has a brother in MNG, which is the free alternative to animated GIFs. Tim Rowley has recently sent Mozilla hackers a checkin of preliminary MNG support, as can be read here (Necko/Imglib section). Now, all that's needed is MNG export support for the GIMP!"
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Mozilla Adds MNG Support More

Mozilla Adds MNG Support

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  • Yeah, they should remove the <A HREF> -tag too, in case someone would link to a possibly annoying page?

    Yes, the line below is my signature ;)
  • Yes, PNG is good.

    But yopu can count the number of sites that actually use it on one hand, can't you?

    ----
    Oh my god, Bear is driving! How can this be?

  • You can post PNG feature lists until the cows come home, but it still remains that the PNG format hasn't been a success. You're not gonna find many sites that are as anti-"The Man" and would be the type of site to promote PNGs as Slashdot, yet even they're still using GIFs. It's hard to convince everyone else when the open source crowd won't eat its own dog food. Note that I prefer PNGs myself, but the evidence is pretty clear so far as to its lack of adoption.

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • pretending?

    if he posts for karma then he's a karma whore.

    what he wants to do with that karma is not the issue.

  • How many people has Unisys sued for using Gif's on their websites? I have used gifs for years on my site and I haven't heard a word from their lawyers. Now if I developed commercial software that depends on the Gif format, then I'd expect Unisys to want a piece of the action. Unisys made a big PR blunder, they have backed off and clarified their position. Relax and enjoy your animated Gif's. I do love using the transparent Gif and will continue using them. PNG is cool too.
  • If you're using Windows, MSIE has an option to disable animations. I haven't tried it though.

    Tools->Internet Options->Advanced->Multimedia->Play Animations
  • She's threatened other people [newgrounds.com] with lawsuits, and hasn't been able to follow through because not only does she not have a leg to stand on, but the music she uses belongs to Disney, so she's violating a much more strongly-defended copyright.

    I highly recommend the above link, BTW. Kill them hamsters.

    --
  • Netscape products have always offered hitting 'STOP' twice after the page loads (since 4.x?) to stop Animated gifs ...

    ... PS, yes ... I like a lot of the animated GIFs out there ... the nice clean ones that look like well-done marketing logos.
  • There are 3 animated gifs in the Mozilla chrome. The throbber, the progress meter, and loading for the sidebar.
  • Zico, you're a fucking moron. You're the anti-Signal 11, equal in value but opposite in ideology, posting gibberish that caters to moderators who think blind cynicism is somehow profound.
  • Yeah right... I know someone already said this, but there's a reason that the only two image formats which were being used when I first started using the internet (as you all know, I'm referring to Jpeg and GIF) are not only the de facto standards of today, but they are still the only two image formats used by 99% of webmasters (and that's a conservative estimate).

    The fact is, it made sense to use Jpeg at the time (there were few if any decent, widespread alternatives that had similar "compressability") and CompuServe (which, for all of you net.neophytes was a huge ISP back in the day) threw its weight behind GIF. Sure, better formats have popped up since, but who uses 'em? I don't, /. certainly doesn't, neither does Yahoo!.

    The fact is, if you want to know when an image format is finally on the verge of gaining acceptance, check out the porn world... Porn sites can also tell you when efficient movie formats are mainstream "enough." Virtually the intire PC industry is goverened by either games or porn... It's no surprise that it's dominated by men. ;)

  • Re:But I do not want animated images! (Score:3)

    by thales ( 32660 ) on Saturday June 17, 2000 @06:53PM (#995871) Homepage Journal
    If you are thinking about killing animation check out bug 21623.
  • As I recall, they also wanted a piece if you're making commercial content with non-commercial software, or commercial software which somehow got released without a Unisys license.
  • True. Remember how long it took to get JPEG accepted everywhere? I still have a couple shareware "jpeg-viewer" apps floating around here somewhere....
  • Windows users can use webwasher (www.webwasher.com) to de-animate animations. It's free for personal use, and also has great anti-advertisment tools, cookie-control, pop-up-window destroying, referrer hiding, it's cool!

    --

  • Animations are amazingly annoying, and I hope there will be a preference item to disable them.
  • Compressing tiffs using lzw is optional, btw.

  • So are you trying to say that the PNG format has been a success so far? Nope, I guess even you're not that foolish, so you'd rather just get your panties in a bunch and rant against anybody who states the cold, disappointing truth. Wheeeee :)

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • Serious work on MNG started in 1996, and, IINM, it reached a 1.0 status some time last year. Seriously, though, I can't see why people wouldn't use MNG. The idea behind it is completely useless, so if some users can't view it properly, you're really doing them a favour.

  • Ironic that this story was posted right after one about China cracking down and jailing people who dare try to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre.

    C'mon Mozilla, please lose the red star logo already.

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • Yes, that was kind of neat. Mind you, when the file refuses to load anyway (assuming you're using a decent viewer) or contains incomprehensible garbage, that might be a clue that "hey, something's wrong". To be fair, though, "you may have transferred this file in ASCII mode" is a nicer error message than "could not load image".
  • Given that Slashdot and a million other websites continue to use GIF *how many* ? years after PNG, I think MNG will take just as long to gain acceptance.

    I think that after Mozilla comes out of beta, then sites will start moving to PNG quickly. As a web developer I still see a fair percentage of visitors with Netscape less than 4.5, which doesn't support PNG (*so far as I know... let me know if I'm wrong*)

    We'll see a large-scale displacement of GIFs on my sites within a year, once the percentage of PNG incapable browsers on our sites drops below 10%. Don't hate me, but I subscribe to the theory that if you are a holdout against new technology you gotta roll with the punches and accept it (of course, text alternative menus are a must). MNG will be the same, if it's as good as they say. Like any new technology, if Microsoft and AOL/Netscape support it "out of the box" I'll be moving over again.

    -rt-
  • ...like supporting JNG encoding (JPEG done PNG style), which I'm sure people will love for porn banner ads.

    I thought the same thing, though. I actually went so far as to design my own spec, which I called IMAG8 (Interim Minimal Animated Graphic - 8-bit; basically, a pixel dump of the sprites, and a list of simple frame compositions, all zlib compressed). I believe that the GIF licence will run out before MNG gets widespread support (because it's so complicated), but I thought if I designed a sufficiently simple format, it could replace GIF overnight for many uses (such as banner ads in custom programs used for one specific service, like specialized versions of ICQ).

    I dropped the idea before I released it, though. It worked out okay technically (only a few hundred lines of code for the viewer; it's not that hard when you stick to the rule "implement, then document"), but I decided that I didn't really want to support the use of animated banner ads.

    When you get right down to it, I don't think there's a valid use for that kind of functionality. It's just another way to grab the user's attention to something he'd rather ignore. It ought to be turned off by default in all web browsers.
  • They both suck but i use PNG cause of good compression.


  • But IE has no option to stop those darn Java ads, and I think 'Punch the Monkey' is one of them!

    #$@$#%$#@!!
  • You big loser! USE GIMP. It gots a bueatiful
    interface and its very customizable. Why use
    Photocrap when all it can do is Open, Add Crap,
    Save, and Print. Gheeshe... Why are
    there so many stupid people in the world that use
    those expensive, crappy, MS products?


  • Your argument would be a whole lot stronger if you could come up with a few examples where animated images are part of the content.

    I can't think of any off-hand.

  • But [you] can count the number of sites that actually use [PNG images] on one hand, can't you?

    For a set to be counted on one standard human hand, there must be thirty-one or fewer elements (all five fingers up = binary 11111 = 31). Here's a short list; can you think of more?

    1. Pinocchio's Brother [tripod.com] and redpinocchio [come.to] (my homepage)
    2. Every other site I've designed (can't name them; confidentiality)
    3. PNG headquarters [libpng.org]
    4. League for Programming Freedom [mit.edu]
    5. Burn All GIFs Day [burnallgifs.org]
    6. Campaign for Real Ale [demon.co.uk]
    7. AuctionBeagle [auctionbeagle.com]
    8. University of Puerto Ricto Institute of Neurobiology [clu.edu]
    9. Eressea Fantasy PBEM [eressea-pbem.de]
    10. several clip art sites (here [about.com] or here [google.com])
    To find more, do a web search for burn all gifs [google.com].
  • The problem with the STOP button in Navigator is that they've slipped a SHOP button in right beside it. Generally I only use the STOP button in emergency situations, i.e. I accidently click on a link, on a page that took forever to load, and don't want to go through loading it again to undo my mistake. (i.e. slow loading dynamic pages). So I hit the SHOP button by mistake (I of course have the graphics turned off on the buttons), and whoosh. It sucks. It sucks a LOT.
  • Why not just set up your site to send PNGs and MNGs to browsers that support them, and GIFs to other browsers?
  • www.britz.com - somehow down atm - uses animated gifs in its online booking system tutorial to show requirements and so on.
  • Dickhead. Unused on the web, yes.

    Clue: read a magazine. I see no JPGs and GIFs.

    Yes. I know you're a troll.

  • I do love using the transparent Gif and will continue using them. PNG is cool too.

    PNG supports both GIF-style binary and alpha-blended transparency. If you care about browser support [freesoftware.com], IE 4.02 and later support binary transparency in indexed images, and Mozilla supports full alpha transparency (falling back to dithered alpha on platforms such as X without alpha channels).

  • And yet this is not a troll/flame. *sigh*

  • PNG (Score:1)

    by Tom7 ( 102298 )

    I was pleasantly surprised to find that our friend sourceforge uses only PNG images.

    Despite all PNG's claims, though, Photoshop 5.5 still does a better job of compressing GIFs. =( Needless to say their GIF export code is more mature (they even have a "lossy" compression mode), but that was a disappointment.

    Patent concerns aside, the sooner that I get to stop hearing people pronounce it "jif" (and cringing because I know that's right), the better! Down with GIF!
  • After reading through this whole list of discusion there were only a handful of people who sounded like they even had any idea what they were talking about. That is my only guess as to why this topic was so spammed.

    Okay so MNG isn't widely supported yet, that problem is fixed one application at a time isn't it? I've actually been using it for quite some time and think highly of the format.

    PNG isn't widely supported yet? Not as widely supported as GIF or JPEG but I'm seeing it more and more often. Maybe it is more popular among the geek crowd than among graphic artist but it's starting to spread across the web and is supported in most graphic manipulation and viewing programs I've seen.

    Internet Explorer, Photoshop, whatever can't use it.. I refer you back to answer #1. Support comes one app at a time. If you want your favorite app to support it too then tell them so.

    Mozilla should be working on other things? Mozilla is an open project and people can contribute whatever they are interested in to the cause. MNG is a highly requested feature. If you want something else worked on then either do it yourself or fund someone else to do it.

    PNG/MNG aren't good enough? Again if you don't like the way things are then improve upon it, fund someone else to improve upon it, or convince the patent holder of your favorite standard to make it free. Or just go on paying stupid fees if you want.

    Mozilla has a dumb logo? What the shit does that have to do with MNG in Mozilla? Make a skin for it that has whatever logo you like.

    Your favorite porn site doesn't use PNG/MNG so it must not be a real image format? Maybe they're to busy masturbating over their own models to think about saving their images in a better format. Get a life and get laid and stop wanking to porn sites.
  • More support than GIMP is needed I am afraid

    Well it is supported by Paint Shop Pro, which is really the graphic editor of most people who do web pages and can't afford Photoshop (or don't want to bother with the complexity of it). So it is already well supported on the creation side... now what is needed is support in IE. No support in IE = death.
  • Here are some animated Sokoban solutions [gte.net]. Sokoban is a puzzle game where you have to push blocks around a maze.
  • PNG is not a huge success because browser support for the format has been so shit. Hopefully, Mozilla and future versions of IE will put that right.

  • Lad, you seem to be missing the point here. Do you think that widespread adoption is neccessary for success? It isn't. Most computer users don't know FreeBSD from a bar of soap, yet it plays a vital role in the Internet's running.

    The point is, that while PNG might not have gained the widespread use of GIF, it certainly is a better format, as the feature lists demonstrate. Unless, for some reason, you think that Windows 95 and MS DOS are the best operating systems around, since they were the highest volume selling operating systems? That would be nonsense, of course. In the Bioinformatics arena, Windows 95 and MS DOS are not the optimal OS choices, therefore, in the Bioinformatics arena, Windows 95 and MS DOS were pretty much failures - not sucesses. Please stop posting nonsense, lad.

  • that's right! (Score:3)

    by Pfhreakaz0id ( 82141 ) on Saturday June 17, 2000 @12:38PM (#995901)
    Sure, all that's needed for it to take off is support in Mozilla and the GIMP! Then it'll be the huge success that PNG has been.... right?
    ---

  • damn (Score:3)

    by jackherer ( 82221 ) on Saturday June 17, 2000 @12:38PM (#995902)
    I hoped Unisys' plot to destroy banner ads was going to work...;( K
  • This may be useful in a niche way, but I don't see it really making inroads on the big boys. Jpeg, jpeg2000, and flash/shockwave are going to be all the multimedia necessary for websites in the present and in the foreseable future. Animated gifs are soo old school that they are almost embarassing, typically are vastly overused and tend to detract from the aesthetics and usability of a site. I have seen very few sites that use animated gifs in a useful or even artistic / cool way, whereas I have seen many that use flash and javascript and standard html in very cool ways that enhance usability (though, of course, the use of flash and other elements of "chrome" does not necessarily make a site better).

  • Tech spec (Score:3)

    by seizer ( 16950 ) on Saturday June 17, 2000 @12:40PM (#995904) Homepage
    I know you're all dying to read it...

    http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/ spec/draft-mng-lc.html [libpng.org]

    is it just me, or is it a LOT easier to program a GIF decoder heh.... ah well, the advance of modern technology blah blah.

    --Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
  • Who cares about stupid MNG format! Just use gifs and nobody will have the right to charge you 5000 bucks for a little transparent animated image! What are you people scared of?


  • I can have my totally free, politically correct dancing hamsters.
  • is MNG supported by IE? By a lot of graphics devel programs? The fact that it's in Mozilla is great, but if it's going to catch on, it needs something more used to support it. I don't know anything about MNG, but from what the original poster says, it sounds like it's a very new format...well, new formats need visible applications to support them before they take off. Hopefully we'll see that with MNG.


    One Microsoft Way

  • The lowdown on MNG (Score:4)

    by Linkmastah ( 195740 ) on Saturday June 17, 2000 @12:52PM (#995908)
    For those of you unfamiliar with the MNG (Mulitple-image Network Graphics) format, you can get more info at these sites....

    The official MNG page is here, [libpng.org] and this [libpng.org] is a list of applications which do support MNG. As the article mentions, the GIMP is notable by its absence.

    This [webnetric.com] contains some interesting info on the MNG format, and this [mediafind.de] shows how MNG compares to other image formats.

  • In your email address, you say "THISWORDOPTIONAL", but which word are you talking about?


    One Microsoft Way
  • here, have some Karma

    slut

  • I agree. Without civil disobedience we will get nowhere.

    K

  • Because the embedded objects making up a MNG are normally in PNG format, MNG shares the good features of PNG:

    • It is unencumbered by patents.

    • It is streamable.

    • It has excellent, lossless compression.

    • It stores up to four channels (red, green, blue, alpha), with up to 16 bits per channel.

    • It provides transparency and an alpha channel.

    • It provides platform-independent rendition of colors by inclusion of gamma and chromaticity information.

    • It provides early detection of common file transmission errors and robust detection of file corruption.

    • Single-image GIF files can be losslessly converted to PNG.

    • It is complementary to JPEG and does not attempt to replace JPEG for lossy storage of images (however, JNG-enhanced MNG-LC can accommodate JPEG-encoded images that are encoded in the PNG-like JNG format.

    In addition:

    • It provides animation with variable interframe delays.

    • It allows composition of frames containing multiple images.

    • Multiple-image GIF files (except for those using the "restore-to-previous" disposal method) can be losslessly converted to MNG-LC.

    ___

  • Post a list of links
    Hoping for moderation
    Just a gigolo


    ---
    Zardoz has spoken!

  • Since when is Photoshop a MS product? There's a reason it's called Adobe Photoshop.


    ---
    Zardoz has spoken!
  • Wowee! I really wanted to know that. Thanks for posting!

    I luv my hoes!
  • Mind you, when the file refuses to load anyway (assuming you're using a decent viewer) or contains incomprehensible garbage, that might be a clue that "hey, something's wrong".

    Of course, the signature is there so the decoder can tell that the file is corrupted before it loads the rest of the image. That way, it can abort and not waste bandwidth downloading, or cycles displaying, an image that is obviously screwed up.


    ---
    Zardoz has spoken!
  • is it just me, or is it a LOT easier to program a GIF decoder

    That's what MNG-VLC (Very Low Complexity) is for. It takes out a lot of the complicated features that would be hard to program, like JNG, delta-PNG, and some forms of looping.


    ---
    Zardoz has spoken!

  • The bugzilla report is here [mozilla.org].
    ---
    Zardoz has spoken!

  • You see, a decent viewer can somethings actually correct this type of problem automatically. Considering the ammount of structure in image files, it's actually quite easy to build a reconstructor that will make the image passible.
  • No real designers use gimp man, give it up. And if you think gimp has a kick ass UI, you have larger problems eh.
  • Oh man, I don't mean to bitch but your site could do without that "musical background".
  • Given the way the Internet Explorer 5.01 for Windows 95/98/NT4/2000 can be "modularly" updated using Windows Update, don't be surprised once the final spec for MNG is published Microsoft (or whatever company that handles IE in the future :-) will have an update available to make IE read .MNG files.
  • Oh but yes - see http://www.bazart.co.uk for some damn fine (artistic, cool, funny, quick, quirky, a-little-jerky..) GIF work.

    and about Flash - SVG looks far more promising (already)- and it's an XML subtype.

    You can't base what's coming on what has come before - not in on the web, anyway.

  • NS 4.x: View->Stop Animations will (logically) stop animations on the current page. The closest thing you get to a keyboard shortcut is Alt+V->A.


    -- LoonXTall

  • I find it easier to slap Esc than move the mouse. Unless you have a stupid Gateway keyboard with F11 in the corner.


    -- LoonXTall
  • This will kill one of my excuses why I haven't fixed bug 8415. If somebody fixes bug 19283 I'm in trouble ;-)
  • Under linux you can press ESC to stop animations on the current page.

  • 4.08 is newest browser-only (Navigator) version (the full suite is called Communicator).

    And it supports PNGs, I just checked at the burnallgifs.org site.


    This is my .sig. It isn't very big.
  • I don't give shit what your evaluation function for PNG is. I've never used it, nor do I plan to in the immediate future, but I'm glad it exists.

    No, what I'm saying is that you are an anti-establishment fanboy. You don't have any valid criticism of PNG, but it is so cool to be the persecuted minority on slashdot you had to say something bad about it. I was pissed because your post was modded up. It has now been spanked back down, and I am satisfied.
  • I don't think that even qualified as a flame. Any moron knows Photoshop isn't a Microsoft product.

    'Sides, perhaps no one with moderator points has read this far down?
  • You can disable the shop button by using X properties

    #!/bin/sh

    MOZILLA_HOME=/opt/Netscape4.73
    export MOZILLA_HOME

    JAVA_HOME=$MOZILLA_HOME/java; export JAVA_HOME
    NPX_PLUGIN_PATH=$MOZILLA_HOME/plugins; export NPX_PLUGIN_PATH

    xrdb -merge <<EOF
    !# netscape 4.7 hacks
    Netscape4*toolBar.myshopping.isEnabled: false
    Netscape4*toolBar.search.isEnabled: false
    Netscape4*toolBar.destinations.isEnabled: false
    Netscape4*XmTextField.background: #ffffff
    EOF
    #limit ram usage to 60mb
    ulimit -m 60000
    if [ -L "$HOME/.netscape/lock" ];
    then
    $MOZILLA_HOME/netscape \
    -remote 'openURL(file:/home/matt/public_html/searcher/inde x.html,new-window)'
    if [ $? -ne 0 ];
    then
    $MOZILLA_HOME/netscape -name Netscape4
    fi
    else
    $MOZILLA_HOME/netscape -name Netscape4
    fi
  • Of course... if you wanna be a karma whore (or prude), post early, or reply to something near the top, even if there's only a passing resemblance... :)

  • what I'm saying is that you are an anti-establishment fanboy.

    But you guys have been telling me all this time that there is no Slashdot GroupThink. But now you're saying that Slashdot is nothing but another bullshit establishment?

    Thanks man, that truly was the post of the year around here. :)

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com, the anti-establishment rebel-type dude, yeehaw!

  • Okay, since you're being as anal retentive as they come, I guess I'll have to qualify my response, then. Not a problem. Among humans living on the planet earth who use the internet, the PNG format has been a failure. Period.

    Happy now?

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • If you actualy bothered to read up about it. You'll see that it is a better format the GIF. And it's a free format.\

    I personaly am not scared of anything thank you very much. I'm just a a bit sick of the GIF, it's old technology. And MNG seems a whole lot better.

  • Well I was talking more about sites that use PNGs for just their own merits not because GIFs are evil.

    ----
    Oh my god, Bear is driving! How can this be?
  • Yes, exactly. You are indeed a lonely guardian of truth and rationalily among ignorant sheep.
  • Actually no... the lady who started that whole dancing hamster thing is suing this one guy cause he called his page "The satanic dancing hamster page" don't worry about a lawsuit though - I got your back.

  • But I do not want animated images! (Score:3)

    by glitch! ( 57276 ) on Saturday June 17, 2000 @01:02PM (#995940)
    I guess I have to admit that every now and then I run across an animated GIF that is actually interesting or amusing...

    But as a general rule, I find animated images to be annoying and repulsive. They tend to be distracting, and draw my attention away from the real reason I have the web page on my screen - the content.

    Every day, I wish that my browser had an option to disable animated images. Perhaps there could be a menu icon I could click to enable them on the rare occasion that I really wanted to see the other frames. Now THAT feature would be a major plus to Mozilla. Chances are, I will some day go into the code and add it myself (THANK YOU, MOZILLA for the source code :-)

    Honestly, how many of you really enjoy those crappy, animated banner ads on your screen? Is this going to be an *improvement* for Mozilla?

  • don't forget [Macromedia] fireworks too...
  • Yes, and writing a haiku (something that is NEVER funny) for the point of getting moderation points. Somewhat hypocritical, don't you think?

    FUCK YOU ALL
  • that wasn't a troll, I was genuinely pissed off at that karma-whore

  • It's all about lag time. You can't replace a basic format like GIF until some very high % of your users can view the new format. This takes years. You just have to be patient.

    All the more reason to get the new formats supported by browsers ASAP, of course
  • Animated images are quite useful in the context of Mozilla-the-toolkit. For example, the animation in the throbber in the top right corner of the browser is trivially implemented as an animated GIF.
  • That "less than 4.5" thing doesn't quite work, because Netscape's releases for Windows didn't go in numerical order at one point. I forget what the numbers were, but it was something like 4.16 being the browser-only (no mail/news/etc.) counterpart of 4.6...
    --
    No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.
  • Actually, IE5 (and IE4 I believe) both have the ability to turn off animated GIFs. If you go to 'Internet Options', under the advanced tab, you'll find an option for 'Play Animations'. If you uncheck it, it will only display the first frame of animated GIFs. It's kind of funky seeing those 'Punch The Monkey and Win $20' ads sitting still. (Still don't win the $20, drats! - one of these days. :P)
  • PNG doesn't even show up on Usenet yet, all the Piccys there are still gif's and jpgs, with the odd bmp from the clueless. Unisys' LZW patent runs out very soon anyway, so gif's will be free again pretty soon.
  • Tim Rowley is not a Netscape developer. No resources were taken away from other parts of the browser to get MNG in. If he wasn't working on MNG, he probably wouldn't be working on any other part of Mozilla either (except for PNG maybe).
  • If you want to make MNG files from scratch, use Animation Shop, which is included with Paint Shop Pro. They've supported it for a while. Beware though, the file sizes are huge, but hey, at least you did your part against UNISYS.

  • Hrm (Score:1)

    by GoRK ( 10018 )
    Now all that's needed is MMG support in ANYTHING AT ALL!!!!!!!!!!
  • Musical background? You use Micro$oft IE, right?
  • Tiff also SUPPORTS the LZW compression that Unisys owns the patent for, however many applications that use TIFF do not, and it's not used all the freaking time, like it is in GIF.
  • But as a general rule, I find animated images to be annoying and repulsive. They tend to be distracting, and draw my attention away from the real reason I have the web page on my screen - the content.

    If you replace "animated images" with "animated ads" I'd agree with you 100%. Most people like animated images if it is part of the content.

  • Out come the "moderate me" whores; comments (Score:3)

    by Sleepy ( 4551 ) on Saturday June 17, 2000 @01:20PM (#995955) Homepage
    Someone's tagline once said "cutting and pasting from the linked Slashdot article is not Informative... it's Redundant". I agree.

    I would rather see some discussion more on-topic, such as why this is good, or bad... not "for your convenience" cut and pasting from obvious links.

    I'm glad that people are excited about this format. I hope that in 5 years it becomes a well-used standard. PNG is just starting to catch on in the graphics industry, although it's nowhere near as well supported as say TIFF.

    And that's too bad.. you always know PNG video frames are lossless, and they're lots smaller than pure uncompressed stuff.

    More support than GIMP is needed I am afraid. This is needed in things like Broadcast 2000, where it might make an impact.

    Given that Slashdot and a million other websites continue to use GIF *how many* ? years after PNG, I think MNG will take just as long to gain acceptance.

    But Mozilla MNG support's still nice, for small niche websites where you know the audience is capable of viewing it without a Netscape 4 plugin and IE control.
  • tif[f] is a widely used format. Developed by Aldus (now part of Adobe) and Microsoft. Tiff also contains the LZW compression that Unisys own the patent for...

    K

  • Re:MNG file signature (Score:3)

    by Signail11 ( 123143 ) on Saturday June 17, 2000 @01:26PM (#995957)
    Actually, the signature used in PNG/MNG is a *very* cool hack. By including both the LF and CR ASCII bytes, a properly constructed PNG/MNG decoder can determine whether or not the image file was misconverted as it passed through different computer systems than the one it was created in (ie. the file might have been sent in text mode by accident).
  • Did we _REALLY_ need a new form of animated graphics? Oh well. Maybe it'll lessen the amount of Java (gag) banner ads that have been appearing lately. D:

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