Are You Ready For Burn All GIFs Day? 346
ESR writes "Are you ready for Burn All
GIFs Day?. On November 5, webmasters all over the world will
convert their sites to eliminate all GIFs. Please join this
effort and show Unisys that the net will not tolerate its sleazy
attempt at a $5000-per-site shakedown based on the LZW patent.
For tools to make converting your entire site easy, see the
gif2png home
page. "
Re:Docbook still using gif ? (Score:3)
Two suggestions (Score:5)
I have two comments to make about this.
Number one, I think this excessive worry about whether PNG support in existing browsers is sufficient, is another instance of this sin of ``worrying about appearance more than about content'' pointed out by ESR [tuxedo.org] in his HTML Hell Page [tuxedo.org]. The whole idea of having transparency in images seems dubious at best.
Even if you insist on having transparent images, please don't let the fact that PNG browser support is not perfect prevent you from using them anyway. If you do, it never will be perfect (spell ``vicious cycle''). This (refusing PNG's because browsers don't fully support them) is a form of bugware: don't indulge in bugware. Just like you should write correct HTML even though buggy HTML might look better on some (or even on all) browsers. (One canonical example of this is — which I insist on using even though Netscape — under Linux at least — bugs on it.)
Secondly, I have a proposal for action, to show how ridiculous this whole patent issue is. Create a small image that reads something like ``PATENTS SUCK''. Draw it on a piece of paper. Get a copy of the GIF standard, and do the LZW compression by hand. This is not nearly as hard as Huffman, it should be doable if the image is small enough. Then distribute the image as widely as possible. Even better: sell it, so you can claim you made a commercial use of it.
Suddenly your brain is worth $5000. Impressive isn't it?
Re:fun with PNGs (Score:2)
} saving them to PNG format...
} Unfortunately the images, compared to saving
} JPEG files with compression set to 1(at least
} in PSP) resulted in UNGODLY huge file sizes
No surprise there. PNG is for computer graphics.
JPEG is for natural images. You need both in
your toolbag.
This is old news, and blown out of props... (Score:5)
b) This issue is terribly old, nearly ancient, and *HAS* been addressed by Unisys. I'm no friend of patent whores, but to be fair to Unisys, the Gif2Pingers are blowing this way out of proportions.
c) PNG would have replaced GIFs a long time ago, if the PNG advocates would realize that there are platforms out there than PCs - and that certain browsers do NOT support PNG, and that PNG support in some browsers is spotty at best.
d) The same goes for pulling the head out of the ass, and providing bowers plugins for both main browsers, for all three main platforms, Mac, PC and Unix.
I'd have switched a long time ago, if platform support were there - so far, pNG is a nice technology, but nothing much beyond that, if it means cutting out a majority of my browser users.
Harry
Re:Will this work out as hoped ? (Score:5)
One more time:
perl -pi -e 's:ANIMEXTS1:ANIMEXTZ1:'
perl -pi -e 's:NETSCAPE2:NOTSCAPE2:'
Run that AFTER you Fortify to 128 bit (you DO Fortify those weak 56 bit browsers, right?) and then Netscape will show it ONCE and then stop.
Re: Gifs are good tho (Score:4)
I have experienced this problem with some program (can't remember which) too, but I have never experienced that with gif2png or pnmtopng.
So I don't know what you are doing wrong, but switching to gif2png or pnmtopng is probably a pretty good fix - and gif2png can handle a whole directory at a time.
Back to the topic of GIF burning:
Most people have probably made their GIF files with a licensed program (or have had them made in a non-software-patent country), so there are probably not many people, if any, this whole LZW licensing story will touch.
We should, despite this, fight software patenting in general (those of us who believe it is wrong). But I can't see there is any point in wacking Unisys all the time. It looks more like witch-hunting than sensible action. What about MIT, Microsoft, IBM, and all the other companies who also hold software patents?
I have decided to keep my old GIF files around together with the PNG versions of the images. Using content negotiation and the MultiViews setting in Apache, I leave the actual choice of PNG or GIF to my visitors.
Jacob (who lives in a software patent free country :)
Re:Software patents != free market (Score:2)
Copyrights are essential to software though, especially GPLed software. It's the copyright holder who decides what license to release a program under. If copyright laws were abolished, Microsoft would have the same rights to your code as you do, and could legally take your GPLed code and use it in closed source software.
--
Re:Help get Mozilla to support full alpha in PNG! (Score:2)
Some more info... (Score:3)
One of these additions suggests that the Unisys patent is not enforceable in Australia (among a few other major countries). I encourage people to read the article linked, and (even though it was posted back in August) feel free to add further information likely to be considered relevant.
Please note that evolt.org is a resource largely for Web designers, so even though there are many OSS-related postings, a lot of the content is aimed at those who produce their images on Windows/MacOS machines. As such, the original article is more of a "if you are using Photoshop, then calm down - you're OK!" type thing, than applicable to those using free image-manipulating software.
Re:Does xv work on PNGs? (Score:4)
There's been a PNG patch for Xv available since
1995. Xv itself hasn't been upgraded because
in order to keep GIF support without paying
the tax it has to have been released before
January 1, 1995, according to the original
UNISYS manifesto. But since the grandfather
clause seems to be gone now, Xv's only choices
seem to be to eliminate GIF support or to pay up.
Re:We aren't ready for this (Score:3)
Re:Is the browser support there yet? (Score:5)
http://graphicswiz.com/png/pngapps.html
(as pointed out in one of the refered pages)
Is the browser support there yet? (Score:2)
Does anyone else find this a bit ironic? (Score:3)
Re:Will Slashdot play? (Score:2)
It'd be really cool if sites that are funded by banner adds would require that the ads be .png or .jpg images. This would reduce the obnoxiousness and load time of the ads immensely.
Andover Should Then (Score:2)
IIRC Slashdot uses Adfu [209.207.224.220], Rob's open source ad server. When Andover [andover.net] took over Adfu when they picked up Slashdot so Andover might still be liable. In other words, yes the ads are run on Slashdot servers so we should all contact [andover.net] Andover and ask them to burn the GIFs! Actually, we should talk to Rob [cmdrtaco.net], because he would probably still be in charge of Adfu itself and would be the one who'd have to rewrite the script.
Re:Can't we all just be happy? (Score:2)
Will this work out as hoped ? (Score:4)
For one, as far as I've been able to tell, Unisys hasn't made any real attempts to ENFORCE this since making that initial announcement (I'm sure somebody will correct me if I'm wrong).
The second issue is that PNG support in web browsers isn't perfect, and from what I've seen, animated PNG support is nonexistant... is it really feasible to do this now ? Imagine the logical extreme... java/javascript ad banners... AAARRARARRRGH !!!!!
Again, I completely agree with this initiative, and long-since scrapped all my GIF usage a long time ago, and I've been lobbying my school (Georgia Tech) to do the same in all class curricula and on their web page. But, I just don't think that there's a workable alternative for ALL usage of GIFs right now.
Aren't there compatibility problems? (Score:4)
Besides, didn't the people say they werent going to press charges anyways?
Is slashdot ready? (Score:2)
hmmm...
Re:Some info & limitation on/of PNG (Score:3)
} communications because of its streamability and
} progressive display capability. PNG shares those
} attributes. (Stress added).
} ====Can some one tell me
} PNG can support animation?? what does
} "progressive display capability" mean ??====
It refers to the ability to display a low-resolution
version of the image followed by increasing amounts
of detail. Not animation. For animations, see MNG.
Re:Overreactions -- Business as usual (Score:5)
I think it makes sense for us all to switch to PNG now, because if we don't switch, good PNG support will never become de rigeur for web browsers.
We have to force the issue.
Since PNG is also technically superior (it compresses better), good support in browsers will mean that nobody uses GIFs any longer. And people will notice when a format goes out of use due to software patent problems.
Thanks
Bruce Perens
Re:Islamic fatwa against software patents? (Score:2)
Burn All GIFs Day??? (Score:2)
Re:PNGs have better compression (Score:5)
Not really, if you have the same palette the PNG will be smaller than the GIF nearly every time. The only time when the GIF will be smaller is when you're eithor A: Working with 2 pixel images where one pixel is white and the other is black or B: You've images happen to be one of the specific patterns of bits which LZW is optimal at compressing.
This means that, for all real life intents and purpoises, the use of PNG/JPEG will *always* be smaller than GIF.
Re:stupid (Score:2)
And 3 or 4 dozen emails... "what the hell happened to
my banners?"
Re:Overreactions -- Business as usual (Score:2)
On the other hand, patents, copywrights, and the like provide a service by preserving the ideas and technology behind the inventions and writings. This is actually, AFAIK, one of the reasons these things were developed, so that inventions, books, etc would not be lost forever when they stopped being sold, or something weird happened.
Of course, there are a lot of people who make a living by developing new things, and I think they have a right to profit from the sale of those things.
I think that in our zeal for free software, we easily forget that legal protections of IP do serve a purpose.
Of course, I think this whole GIF thing is total BS, but that is, as you say, because of the "bait and switch," not because they are trying to charge for their patent.Re:So when.. (Score:2)
As I recall from the last time we saw this, it expires in 2003, which is why UniSys wants to crack down on things now -- to get the last drops of blood out of the stone.
Re:Shakedown unenforcable due to common usage (Score:2)
Also, why do you feel it neccesary to put three lines of white space between each of your paragraphs and/or sentances? Not everyone has a huge, high res screen and can afford wasted space like this, you know. Think a little before you post about things like this.
Re:Why this is a good thing... (Score:2)
Now, if you are a major site are you going to risk alienating your audience and advertisers with content your viewers cannot access, simply because some misunderstood argument about patent enforcement is being bandied about? I don't think so. You won't be a major site for long.
Re:Overreactions -- Business as usual (Score:3)
You mean only when it entrenched as a de facto BBS standard. Unisys has been trying to enforce it patents since the late 80s, long before the WWW days.
Most BBS standards died along with the medium -- GIF unfortunately survived. Blame Mosaic and Netcape for foisting a dubious standard on to the World Wid Web at it's inception. There was an opportunity there to introduce a new image format, and it was balked.
--
Re:Ultra-small GIFs are larger as PNG! (Score:3)
~k.lee
and the first site... (Score:2)
Re:Is Unisys in Financial Trouble (Score:2)
A brief bit of history - Compuserve published the GIF format in the 1980s without regard to the fact that it used patented technology. The "minicomputer giant", Unisys (formerly Sperry Univac) was so out of it that they didn't realize that their algorythm was all over the online world until the late eighties. Then they started to demand that authors fork over money. The big guys (Adobe, Corel) have been paying Unisys for over a decade.
--
Jpeg 2000 anyone ??? (Score:2)
PNG is a good thing, and has always been a good thing since it arrived, but I fear that it won't ever be a de facto standard. Sure, I want real transparency (GIF? Does masking at best, it's plain silly) and non LZW, but I won't recode any browsers (especially since I am using IE and can't stand Netrape/Mozilla with it's lack of design) nor will I recode any software packages (few of them seem to be able to save PNGs correctly && be of any use). On top of this, will there be a gateway that translates GIFs into PNGs? Because as far as I know, I can't make everyone use PNG...
Once again, I hope those that has invested in JPEG will make use of it, and thus make it widespread.
Re:Overreactions -- Business as usual (Score:3)
B) Patents (and copyright) have everything to do with a free market. You can't have a free market in information-based things without an artificial monopoly, because the marginal cost is zero. Free markets only work when the goods in the market have certain properties, and software does not have those properties. If you want to use a free market to determine how software production resources should be allocated, rather than, say, having the government decide it by funding software development with a tax on something, you've got to artificially give software the properties that real property has.
Re:We aren't ready for this (Score:2)
| currently being worked on. It's not done yet, | but...
The format is done. The applications aren't.
But ImageMagick's implementation of MNG-LC is
fairly complete.
Read the spec at http://www.cdrom.com/pub/mng/
Zero support on the mac platform under IE... (Score:3)
Re:We aren't ready for this (Score:3)
Wrong, PNG has support for paletted images with 2, 4 and 8 bits per pixel. Moreover, the compression method is the only thing that will determine the resulting file size. That's why PNG beats GIF all the time, it has a better method including clever filtering as a pre-compression step.
JPEG is obviously not practical to replace GIF, the images are larger and lack the indexed color of GIFs as well.
JPEG's are for continuous-tone images (== photos), GIF's are aimed at pictures with large areas of the some colors and relatively few colors, e.g. cartoons. That's why PNG and JPEG hardly overlap, it has nothing to do with the size of the image. Palettes wouldn't make sense in JPEG, the compression method in it works on truecolor data only.
Re:We aren't ready for this (Score:2)
| can have GIFs with two or three colors. I don't
| believe PNGs have this ability.
In fact, you can have a 3-color PNG, but with
GIF you can't. GIF palettes must be a power
of 2 in length. You can have a 150-color PNG
but with GIF you have to waste 105 palette entries
if you have 150 colors.
Islamic fatwa against software patents? (Score:5)
It's hopeless to expect reform from within... the patent crisis is not even on the national agenda. The average person has never even heard of the issue.
The only viable medium-term strategy is containment. US-style software patents (and business model patents and other bogosity) cannot be allowed to spread to other countries. Containment efforts should therefore shift away from the US and towards other countries and cultures.
It would be very helpful, for instance, if influential Islamic clerics could examine the issue of patents on mathematical formulas and business models and determine if they are compatible with the Quran and Islamic teachings.
I'm not Muslim and have no idea... but usury and other practices are disallowed under Islamic law, so it's possible they would disallow software patents and issue a fatwa [usc.edu] or legal opinion to that effect.
Broadly speaking, patents that cover small human ingenuities and artifices should be OK... but if the universe is the creation of God, then asserting ownership over fundamental laws of nature and mathematical formulas seems a trifle blasphemous.
A finding that software patents are un-Islamic would, in effect, permanently immunize the Islamic countries from this nonsense. It would create an invulnerable "patent haven" that would set an example for the rest of the world.
Remember, containment kept Communism in check until it collapsed under its own weight. It should work for "patent disease" as well... but it could take decades, and things will get worse before they get better.
Send RMS to Saudi Arabia... I'm not kidding.
Re:Overreactions -- Business as usual (Score:3)
IE and Netscape are too large for their customers to download on 14.4 lines in addition to per minute charges. Until Mozilla ships (hopefully < 2M) it won't be possible for them to convert to PNG.
The only other option I can think of is a plugin to handle the PNG images. Does anyone know of such a plugin?
Re:This is stupid. Not gonna happen! (Score:2)
First - PNG's can't technically actually replace GIF's because PNG's can't do what GIF's can do, like animation and simple transparency support. Without a solid, _single_, replacement file format, it's going to go the way of all newer technology - slowly being picked up by the early adopters that don't mind all the problems and then five to eight years later by the mainstream.
Second - we can't expect everyone to convert to a new format if we haven't actually supplied folks with a decent toolset, which includes easy to use tools to create animated [P|M]NGs. Even if people could convert their GIFs to animated PNGs they'll want to keep using their time-tested tools and not go through another conversion.
Re:Shakedown unenforcable due to common usage (Score:3)
Ok, the way a patent works is that you give away the specs to your new invention to the public in exchange for a 17 year government-enforced monopoly on that invention.
That's not exactly how it's enforced/done now, but that's the idea.
So, they can try to take your money, and PNG is technically superior to GIF anyway.
Make the world a better place... convert your GIFs to PNGs.
PNG was over-designed (Score:3)
Slowly the spec was released. It was immediately clear that the spec was another 'ideal' format for lossless graphics that was created by people who didn't know or care what Gifs were being used for. We had been promised a replacement for Gif and this was not it. Sure it could support true-color with embedded gamma settings. But could it do animation? Of course not. Then there was MNG. To replace GIF, which takes about 20K worth of C source code (a little for for animation), I now need to support two formats, and add 120K to my application's binary. Hell, even the reference implementation didn't even work right for months and people just reading the spec were supposed to implement it.
Frankly everybody should just sit back, shut up and live with it. There was a window of opportunity to quickly create a replacement for GIF, but that day is gone. The patent expires in a few years anyway. PNG is an impressive format, but it is not the replacement for GIF we wanted or needed. We we burned by the PNG format, why should we now burn the only real cross platform lossless format. It sucks, but this is tech.
Let them know you are in compliance. (Score:4)
Re:I won't be burning any GIFs (Score:3)
Re:I won't be burning any GIFs (Score:3)
Will Slashdot play? (Score:4)
As I type this, there is an animated GIF ad just above the "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." slogan on my screen. Will Slashot ban GIFs and sacrifice the ad revenue? Or are we about to be embarrassed, thoroughly, when Burn All GIFs day is a bust?
Unfortunately, the organizers didn't do the ground work, like distributing Java or Javascript code that could provide advertisers with alternate means for doing animated ads, plus conversion scripts to instantly turn an animated ad into an alternative form. Yes, this would have required work. But since that work wasn't done, the open source community is about to be embarrassed as every webmaster who depends on ad revenue ignores the call.
Overreactions -- Business as usual (Score:5)
Unisyss invested resources in developing LZW, the algorithm used by GIFs. Their owners (investors) have every right to cash in on GIFs. If there is a better alternative for the price, the market will adjust, and folks will use other compression formats. This market really does work -- with or without virtual pyros.
Relax, and choose the options that work best for you. Everything will work itself out; the fastest and biggest bank of information (um... that would be the Internet) doesn't need help from geeks in serch of a cause.
Perhaps instead of investing time and energy on Unisys and GIFs, we could be writing drivers for the open source community...
- Tom Vitolo
Just a guy who likes computers (and has a degree in Economics)
Re:Does ping support transparency? (Score:3)
Not very cool, eh?
I don't understand how they can start enforcing their patent rights to gif89a compression after it has been in heavy public use for so long. This could be likened to MS giving a program away for free for a year, and then deciding to charge everybody that has used it $200.
The $5000/Site "Shakedown" is a red herring (Score:5)
While I strongly feel we need to abolish the Patent Office, as it no longer serves to common man, and I also tend to respect many of ESR's writings and his role as an open source advocate, I really object to this type of yellow journalism that is hype-oriented and does not convey an accurate picture of the truth. The last time this thread came up on /., I wrote off the sensationalism of every webmaster has to cough up $5000 simply as ignorance. /. revealed the truth on this matter and I find the continued dishonesty via omission to be reprehensible.
How is the open source movement to have any credibility when we choose to employ the same tactics as da man?
Gifs are good tho (Score:4)
This is stupid. Not gonna happen! (Score:5)
No one -- not a single person -- doing serious commercial Internet work would consider it for a moment. Why? Clients today (and busdev, marketing types when stuff is developed internally) still hold the 3.0+ rule as ironclad, and that rules out PNG.
For the tens of millions of "nothing" sites out there that together represent a tiny percentage of Internet traffic have that as their option, of course, since they have little traffic anyway. Losing a few percent to people with old browsers isn't going to hurt them.
PNG support is too spotty in the modern browsers to seriously do it anyway. They all seem to handle things like transparency differently, and things like that.
On the low-end of the internet bell curve, wanna-be designers are way to infatuated with their animated GIFS -- the late 90's version of the blink tag. They're certainly not going to switch and give up their beloved animated icons collection.
*shrug* Seems like a reactionary move that won't get anywhere. The effort wasted changing sites to a widely-incompatible format would be better spent writing to your congresspeople and getting these rediculous century-old patent laws changed.
Re:Is the browser support there yet? (Score:5)
<script language="JavaScript"> <!--
if (navigator.mimeTypes &&
navigator.mimeTypes["image/png"] != null && navigator.mimeTypes["image/png"].enabledPlugin)
document.write('<img src="image.png">');
else
document.write('<img src="image.gif">');
// -->
</script>
<noscript>
<img src="image.gif">
</noscript>
The
Again, a simple wrapper could probably be made for this if anyone else finds it useful.
- Michael T. Babcock <homepage [linuxsupportline.com]>
Re:The $5000/Site "Shakedown" is a red herring (Score:3)
- Michael T. Babcock <homepage [linuxsupportline.com]>
Re:I won't be burning any GIFs (Score:5)
-rw-rw-r-- 1 reject reject 21095 Oct 31 13:56 test.gif (GIF)
-rw-rw-r-- 1 reject reject 1910 Oct 31 13:54 test.png (Indexed PNG)
-rw-rw-r-- 1 reject reject 6412 Oct 31 13:58 test2.png (RGB PNG)
So does this mean you'll be converting all your pages to PNG now?
--
Reject
We aren't ready for this (Score:4)
In most browsers, PNG support is incomplete at best, buggy at worst. The rendering time for PNGs is also far greater, especially if you have a slow machine.
GIFs are also far more compact than PNGs; you can have GIFs with two or three colors. I don't believe PNGs have this ability.
JPEG is obviously not practical to replace GIF, the images are larger and lack the indexed color of GIFs as well.
The intentions might be honorable, but most sites can't afford the additional time it takes to convert and the increased bandwith usage.
This idea is a little bit ahead of its time. Maybe if software support gets better and we can all afford the increased bandwidth, then it will time to dump GIF.
Re:Whoah, Reality Check! (Score:3)
Don't worry about it. (Score:5)
I guess users of Photoshop are fine, it's just GIMP users that are effected by this. Oh, wait...
But as the Burn all GIF's page states, LZW is a patented algorythm that's inferior to superior and unpatented algorythms which is used to create obsolete GIF files.
My question is, why does anyone even care then? Use JPEG or PNG. Other formats exist. If you want to use GIF files for any reason, then there's a price to pay. That's either $5,000 for the "license" from unisys, or $49 for some cheapo program that you never need to install, just have handy to say that yes, you have a license... If you don't like their terms, there's plenty of other formats to use.
If you value compatiblity, then, it is their algorythm afterall. No matter how innane current patent laws seem, they are the law, afterall.
Good Bye HamsterDance!!! (Score:3)
Re:Is the browser support there yet? (Score:3)
burning gifs? (Score:4)
maybe it should have been delete the gifs day...
oh well
How do you tell? (Score:3)
Re:Overreactions -- Business as usual (Score:5)
That's my take on the situation, anyway.
Re:Whoah, Reality Check! (Score:4)
You're right, for now PNG isn't really a viable alternative, it simply isn't widely supported enough to be the one true format, but it IS good enough to replace GIFs in most situations.
It's supported (to some degree) in both NS and IE (Don't know about Opera), except not fully. There are some links at the bottom of http://www.w3.org/Graphics/PNG/ [w3.org] to test how well your browser supports it.
Netscape can't do translucencies (but it can do transparencies), and I'm pretty sure IE has some issues with it (It'll load PNGs embedded into a web page but not by themselves, it's odd). But both do have some degree of PNG support. However, I don't think they have MNG support, so it'll be difficult to replace animated GIFs (they should be elimated anyways)
Besides, the point of this isn't really to permanently replace all images on all pages, it's to get a message across about patents and gifs. There is definately enough support for that (Both in software and mindshare).
I've went off on a tangent here. I only meant to reply to say that IE does semi-support PNG. So I'll shut up now.
--
Reject
Conversion to PNG (Score:3)
I converted my pages over to PNG on general principles when Unisys started this. The only thing left in GIF format is a NetMechanic graphic, and that's hosted off of NetMechanic's servers. Unisys wants payment for that, they can talk to NetMechanic.
My problem with Unisys is that this is the third time they've changed their story. First, they put LZW compression forward to Compuserve when CIS was explicitly looking for an unencumbered graphics format. Then, when this format became popular, Unisys turned around and said that it's really encumbered, but we're only going to charge commercial vendors, not freeware. Now, they're saying they're going to charge freeware too, and individuals if you can't prove the software had a license. Yes, I know what Unisys is saying. I also know what their written statements say. They conflict, and in any conflict involving lawyers I believe only what's written on paper with a signature below it.
Long and short, I dislike Unisys's attitude and PNG does what I need and lets me avoid dealing with Unisys. No contest. Sorry, Unisys, as far as I am concerned you lose.
Re:Will this work out as hoped ? (Score:4)
Re:Gifs are good tho (Score:3)
> PNG's typically compress 5%-25% better than
> GIF's do. Not only that, but "PNG's compression
> is fully lossless" (that's off the website While
> I agree that older browsers not supporting PNG
> is a problem, they do seem to be a nice graphics
> format.
While PNGs are great, and may compress better, the current crop of browsers have a horrible time loading them (speed-, and feature support-wise). This becomes even more of a problem when people load something like quicktime, which I've seen hijack the PNG support in IE, which means you're not just loading an image, you're loading a plugin *and* an image.
Hopefully things like Mozilla will fix some of these problems, and who knows, maybe PNG support will improve in Netscape and IE. Unfortunately, that still doesn't take care of old browsers. Check your logs, you'd be *amazed* how many connections you'll see from Netscape 2.x/3.x and sometimes even older...
Why this is a good thing... (Score:4)
GIF --> PNG? As good a choice as any. (Score:3)
Personally, I'm all for it. GIF, as a graphic format, is pretty much deprecated and useless. The two uses there still are: ad-banners and tiny pictures on homepages. Yes, I would love to have transparency for PNG, but I can live without it. There are ways to circumvent the absence.
Of all the graphics I've done recently, they're just about anything but GIFs. Should it be grayscale or full-color, I just don't see the need for GIF-use any longer. It was a fine format once in its time, but evolution does happen. Even in computer world, where draggind the past along with is de facto.
True, Unisys can never enforce their license to the full. They don't even have to. There are much better formats available, and people are actually starting to use them.
As to the annoyance of potential java-banners... True, they are really horrible. The few I've witnessed are not easy for eyes and not the browsers either. Who ever said java should be kept on at all times? From personal experience it only hinders surfing. And I'm not the only one, this opinion seems to be commonly shared.
Actually, Unisys may be doing a big favor to the web community. By being greedy, they encourage the users to stop using GIFs in the first place. No, it's not the license itself but all the talk and noise it invariably generates among the public.
Now, are there any other deprecated formats, of any kind or in any use, that we should get rid of?
Help get Mozilla to support full alpha in PNG! (Score:5)
Re:I won't be burning any GIFs (Score:3)
Did someone pay for a license to use LZW compression in the gimp? If not then the gif you made doesn't use LZW compression which means the file will be larger than it would be if you used a program that supported LZW compression.
Re:what is the compression algorithm of PNG? (Score:5)
First some background for people who don't know much about compression. LZ77 and LZ78 are algorithms published by the same researchers in 1977 and 1978 which exploit repeated patterns in your data to efficiently compress information. Huffman encoding is a different technique for compression which will make the common symbols in your data take up less space.
LZW is a variant of LZ78 compression. It is modified for speed of compression. (Note: compression, not decompression). LZW is what Unisys has a patent on.
Deflate is the algorithm used by gzip and is also used by PKZip. It combines LZ77 with Huffman encoding. It nearly always compresses better than LZW because besides exploiting patterns it will also make the most frequent symbols represented by a small number of bits.
Because LZW is the thing which is patented, and Deflate doesn't use LZW, .PNGs don't have patent issues like gifs, and because Huffman encoding is used they also compress better. So, technically, they are the obvious choice. The only issue is browser compatibility.
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Too little, too late? (Score:3)
There appear to be several things which need to happen before such a boycott could proceed successfully:
Perhaps my biggest qualm is that the initial furor over Unisys has died down. If this had been organized earlier, maybe there would have been more positive reaction--and, I dare say, the mainstream media might have latched on to it!
Re:How do you tell? (Score:3)
Shakedown unenforcable due to common usage (Score:3)
It's not because I can't change my GIF's to PNG's (I can) nor that PNG's aren't supported (if you can't see them, complain to the site for not recognizing them as PNG's).
It's because the source code to GIF encoding/decoding is published here on the Internet AND in deadtree form. I can go to my public library and check out a copy of Windows Bitmapped Graphics and get the code to do GIF encoding/decoding using LZW. There's probably ten to twenty books that do this. Therefore, it's already wide-spread. I bet it would be in the public domain now.
I'm not a lawyer (someone get a lawyer) but I bet it would be nice if someone could take this tactic and nuke the claims Unisis has to charging site owners.
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Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known. -- MSNBC 10-26-1999 on MS crack
Re:Overreactions -- Business as usual (Score:5)
1) Unisys pulled a "bait and switch" by allowing free use for so long, then trying to enforce the patent. I have to wonder if this would hold up in court; I know that you can not allow a trademark to linger like that. Is there an IP equivalent to squatter's rights?
2) Patents - most especially software patents - have nothing to do with the free market; they are artifical inventions of the state.
But if it comforts you, consider the current outrage part of the market adjusting. Feel better?
Re:I won't be burning any GIFs (Score:3)
And duplicating test, I find that Photoshop can produce an RGB JPEG with no noticeable artifacts that is 2.5K smaller than your RGB PNG[1].
Add in the problems that many browsers have with PNG images, and it doesn't start to look so attractive.
[1] If anyone wants to duplicate this with the GIMP, don't bother. It, unfortunately, has rather bad JPEG compression.
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Ultra-small GIFs are larger as PNG! (Score:3)
Try this: 10 x 10 pixel image, 2 colours, non-interlaced, then strip it down and save it as a GIF.
Do the same with a PNG. Then use pngcrush on it to make it as small as possible.
red-white.gif (2 colours in palette): 45 bytes
red-white.png (2 colours saved by PS): 182 bytes
red-white2.png (2 colours, by pngcrush: 144 bytes
For ultra-small graphics, PNG is not anywhere near as small byte-size as GIF.
Re:We aren't ready for this (Score:4)
GIFs are also far more compact than PNGs...
Not true. The lossless PNG format is almost always smaller than GIF. PNG also has variable compression settings and loads progressively (i.e. on a slow connection, you can make out most of the image content before all the data has been loaded). PNG is the superior format in almost every way, except that it lacks an animation mode. Someone needs to get busy on a good animation format...
What people should do... (Score:3)
Can't be too hard to have apache do most of it for you. Heck you could probably have your fancy
Could be expanded easily when browsers start handling translucency and animation correctly.
Re:Shakedown unenforcable due to common usage (Score:4)
Phil Karn did something similar which proved that the source code printed in the book Applied Cryptology wasn't a mutition that couldn't be exported in accordance to ITAR regulations here in the USA, while the source code typed in and saved onto the disk *IS* a mutition (and thus can't be exported). Something's wrong there.
If Unisis wants to charge fees, it better have it's laywers start on getting all the books pulled from every shelf. Not very eazy, eh?
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Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known. -- MSNBC 10-26-1999 on MS crack
Re:How do you tell? (Score:4)
} programs do not leave a message for Unisys that
} they are liscensed
Many of the animated banners that are served by
the ad brokers contain a GIF comment that says
they were made by Gif Builder (which seems to
be no longer available from its author); others
say they were made with unlicensed or demo programs.
Re:Overreactions -- Business as usual (Score:3)
Does PNG have anything to recommend it over UNcompressed GIFs?
PNG advocates should remember that using same automatically LOCKS OUT everyone who by necessity or by choice still uses an older browser. (I don't know about IE or later NS or AOL versions, but NS 3.x and AOL3.x and below don't support PNG. AOLers tell me AOL4.x is an unmitigated disaster that no one in their right mind would downgrade to.)
Re:Whoah, Reality Check! (Score:3)
Mozilla had it's own problems. It didn't have many problems rendering the pngs against a background, but the pngs themselves seemed broken and unable to render correctly. From the descriptions I read, I couldn't tell if this was intended or not.
Re:Will Slashdot play? (Score:5)
Notice that the animated GIFs do not come from Slashdot's servers themselves. Most sites that have banner ads do not host the images on their own server, since they subscribe to some ad service.
Re:Yeah. I have time to do this.... (Score:3)
This is just a call for those that have these sort of feelings on the issue to abandon GIFs (or other format using LZW) and switch to other formats. Likewise, if there's some images you have which just don't display properly on certain browsers or whatever, then decisions must be made. You can try various other formats, see if any match your needs. Or you can write letters to browser makers to encourage them to properly support existing standards. Proper implementation of existing standards should be important to all of us, otherwise you have no standard.
Re:I won't be burning any GIFs (Score:3)
(RedHat and other Linux distributions ship "libungif" in place of libgif, which uses the less efficient RLE compression)
Re:Ultra-small GIFs are larger as PNG! (Score:4)
in PNG that isn't present in GIF, namely
an 8-byte signature and three required chunks.
The smallest possible PNG is 67 bytes, while
the smallest useful one (a transparent dot
that can be used for a spacer) is 68 bytes.
A file doesn't have to be very large before
this overhead is amortized, though.
How PNGs get handled on my 2nd 'puters. (Score:5)
Once the images were there, I fired up always trusty "Paint Shop Pro v 5.01" to do a Batch conversion. The file sizes seemed about the same size as the original GIF files (which is to be expected given the 1~3K file size).
Then I thought I would throw one of the PNG files back into Netscape v4.7 to see how it handled things. I draged and droped an PNG file into NS 4.7 and saw "Loading plug-in" flash in the status bar ...then the apple logo came up for a split second, then the PNG apeared.
I couldn't believe my own eyes, so I did it again just to make sure I wasn't imagining things....and sure enough, the PNG file format (win98/NS4.7) is being opened by a Apple Quicktime 4.0 plug-in!
Imagine, if you will, when a user goes to load your home page (which you diligently converted to PNG images) and starts seeing the apple logo pop up every time a little 1k PNG is loaded on the page. imagine the user watching his resource meter slowly drop as the plug-in consumes the last of his precious resources.
Has anyone else recently installed the QT 4.0 player? Can you confirm it handling the PNG format?
temporary solution (Score:3)
Re:What about animations? (Score:3)
} The one thing that I've always liked about
} is the animations. So, does anyone have
} suggestions about an open source animated
} format to use in place of
http://www.cdrom.com/pub/mng/
I've been obsessively collecting ad banners for
the past 3 or 4 months. Of the approximately
350 I've got so far, ImageMagick successfully
converts *all* of them to MNG. Total GIF size
is 357 megabytes while total MNG size is 338
megabytes.
PNG compatibility in software (esp. browsers) (Score:3)
For one thing, http://graphicswiz.com/png/pngapbr.html [graphicswiz.com] lists browsers and their state of PNG support. You'll notice what's already been said about Netscape lacking transparency support, et. al., but more importantly they have a list of PNG plugins for different architectures that is worth a try.
More generally, http://graphicswiz.com/png/pngapps.html [graphicswiz.com] lists all applications with PNG support by categories.
What about Andover's Create a .gif site? (Score:3)
Every day we pick the coolest animated GIFs to add to our extensive library, and the best of the best are featured here.
GIFWorks
Enter the URL of an image:
Andover.net sure doesn't seem to have a problem with gif's. I think Rob should try to talk some since into the "leading Linux/Open Source destination on the Internet."
I think Andover need to walk the walk
geach
Re:This is stupid. Not gonna happen! (Score:5)
First of all, a play by play critique:
"No one -- not a single person -- doing serious commercial Internet work would consider it for a moment. Why? Clients today (and busdev, marketing types when stuff is developed internally) still hold the 3.0+ rule as ironclad, and that rules out PNG."
So all the hype about XML is hot air too, since it's only to be supported in the 5.0 browsers. Samething goes for style sheets, etc. In fact, we might as well stop developing new features/formats/etc. because everyone will still be using 3.0 browsers.
"For the tens of millions of "nothing" sites out there that together represent a tiny percentage of Internet traffic have that as their option, of course, since they have little traffic anyway. Losing a few percent to people with old browsers isn't going to hurt them."
This is snobbery. Didn't slashdot start out as Rob Malda's little nothing programming homepage? Those nothing sites are a major part of the draw of net access. Say 20 people looked at my homepage. 10 of them were potential employers checking my resume at their convenience. The other 10 were geographicaly seperated friends just checking to see what's up. I may not be an Amazon or a Yahoo, but that nothing web page is one of (if not the) major reason I pay an ISP. If I just wanted to visit corporate high traffic sites, then I'd get cable television.
"PNG support is too spotty in the modern browsers to seriously do it anyway. They all seem to handle things like transparency differently, and things like that."
PNG transparency support is spotty b/c it is too advanced for today's browsers. In order to implement true alpha channel blending for the .png format, alpha blending must be built into the layout engine -- a nontrivial task. However, Mozilla will be feature alpha blending [mozilla.org] in the layout engine.
"On the low-end of the internet bell curve, wanna-be designers are way to infatuated with their animated GIFS -- the late 90's version of the blink tag. They're certainly not going to switch and give up their beloved animated icons collection."
MNG [cdrom.com]
anyway
Burn all gifs day is a publicity stunt much like the microsoft refund day. But the PNG image format has a _lot_ going for it. Alpha blending alone is enough to make PNG the favorite of designers. But it also supports variable bit depths from 2-24 bit color with loss-less compression, making PNG a complete solution (as opposed to the gif/jpeg situation we are in right now.) for most web graphic needs. Finally, since it would be built into the layout engine we might see a w3c style sheet for alpha blending on more elements than just png images -- another major feature.
Re:Let them know you are in compliance. (Score:5)
Give her a break, no flames.
Re:Overreactions -- Business as usual (Score:3)
Nobody's "locked out" by lack of image support - that's what content negotiation and alternatives (including text descriptions) are for. Anyone who thinks the WWW is a WYSIWYG medium has really missed the point.
Re:How 'bout a Burn All MP3s Day? (Score:5)
Fraunhofer did manage to shut down at least one free mp3 encoding project, 8Hz, despite the fact that there isn't even a patent in the country it was developed in (the Netherlands).
In a way they are worse than Unisys, who have permitted people to make free GIF encoders, but at least they didn't wait until it had become popular and then start demanding license fees.
Some info & limitation on/of PNG (Score:5)
Features:
---------
* PNG supports truecolor images.
* "In particular, GIF is well adapted for online communications because of its streamability and progressive display capability. PNG shares those attributes. (Stress added).
====Can some one tell me
* PNG has been expressly designed not to be completely dependent on a single compression technique.
*"Indexed-color,grayscale, and truecolor images are supported, plus an optional alpha channel. Sample depths range from 1 to 16 bits."
Limitations:
------------
* There is no uncompressed variant of PNG.
* There is no standard chunk for thumbnail views of images.
* There is no lossy compression in PNG.
Hope that clarifies where PNG stands
Manifest