another petition: PNG support

trying to decide if this one is more important than the Walker letter…

I'll leave it up to you folks to decide for yourself of course, but
to get true PNG support in Windows IE would seriously rock the house
for anyone who develops visual things for web browsers for whatever
reason.

presently you can use PNG's in MSIE/Windows but you need to apply a
non-standard, Windows-only 'filter' to the images. it's stupid.

http://www.petitiononline.com/msiepng/petition.html

more from zeldman.com:

A petition to include true PNG support in IE for Windows has accrued
thousands of signatures, and we urge you to add yours. The Portable
Network Graphics (PNG) image format has been kicking around since
1995 and became a W3C standard in 1996. It was created to provide an
open alternative to the proprietary GIF format after Unisys (who
created GIF) announced that they would charge anyone who used GIF a
royalty fee. (Unisys sprung this announcement as the web was
beginning to take off, when GIF was the only image format that worked
in early visual browsers. They do indeed charge a royalty to any
company that displays or exports GIF images. For instance, in order
to export GIF images from Photoshop, Adobe must pay a fee.)

If PNG were merely royalty-free, that would be compelling enough. But
PNG supports ****true alpha transparency**** , whereas GIF
"transparency" is limited to a single channel. If your image contains
antialiased (smooth) type, GIF images produced in Photoshop can fake
transparency by matching edge colors to the background color of your
page. But if your background color changes (after a site-wide
redesign, or via a user-selectable style switcher like the one we use
here), the "transparent" parts of your GIF image will clash with the
new background color. The same is true for drop shadows or any other
soft-edged elements that abut transparent areas.

<twhid>
http://www.mteww.com
</twhid>

Comments

, Christopher Fahey

> I'll leave it up to you folks to decide for yourself of course, but
> to get true PNG support in Windows IE would seriously rock the house
> for anyone who develops visual things for web browsers for whatever
> reason.

Does Microsoft give any reasons *why* PNG is not supported? What exactly
are we fighting against? Is it simply a matter of their IE-for-windows
team being incompetant, or is it something more sinister like maybe MS
is developing a proprietary image format or something?

-Cf

[christopher eli fahey]
art: http://www.graphpaper.com
sci: http://www.askrom.com
biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com

, MTAA

I have two totally guesses:

1. Unisys is giving them handsome kickbacks on the GIF licensing.
(highly unlikely)

2. The open source nature of PNG is antithetical to MS's corporate
philosophy. MS was FORCED to allow GIF support in IE as Netscape
already had the drop on 'em. Just as they're being FORCED to use XML
because the enterprise side of computing is already heavily dependent
on it. They wouldn't support JPEG unless they were FORCED to as well,
which they were (Netscape). Does Windows Media Player even play MPEGs?
They've basically staked out a position in video which is THEM vs.
EVERYONE ELSE, that is, WMP9 (proprietary) vs. MPEG4 (industry
standard, not even open source). MS simply hates to deal in any formats
which they don't COMPLETELY own and control, they will when they have
to, but grudgingly.

Why should they support PNG in their browser when they won't make one
cent in licensing or authoring tools? It's all the bottom line for
them, they don't give a shit that it will make the web a better place
for developers, designers and users. But, hopefully, I'll have to eat
my words when the next IE comes out.

you can read some of MS's feelings regarding anything open source here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/19396.html

(i still like the idea of back ally cash transfers tho, "ok, here's the
GIF money, make sure PNG stays dead!")


On Saturday, May 24, 2003, at 02:34 PM, Christopher Fahey [askrom]
wrote:

>> I'll leave it up to you folks to decide for yourself of course, but
>> to get true PNG support in Windows IE would seriously rock the house
>> for anyone who develops visual things for web browsers for whatever
>> reason.
>
> Does Microsoft give any reasons *why* PNG is not supported? What
> exactly
> are we fighting against? Is it simply a matter of their IE-for-windows
> team being incompetant, or is it something more sinister like maybe MS
> is developing a proprietary image format or something?
>
> -Cf
>
> [christopher eli fahey]
> art: http://www.graphpaper.com
> sci: http://www.askrom.com
> biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com
>
>
>
>
> + ti esrever dna ti pilf nwod gniht ym tup
> -> post: [email protected]
> -> questions: [email protected]
> -> subscribe/unsubscribe: http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz
> -> give: http://rhizome.org/support
> +
> Subscribers to Rhizome are subject to the terms set out in the
> Membership Agreement available online at http://rhizome.org/info/29.php
>
>

<t.whid>
www.mteww.com
</t.whid>

, Are

I remember having great hopes for PNG in a booklet about graphic formats that I wrote some 4 years ago. It all made so much sense; 256 levels of transparency and so on – wow, imagine the potential around the corner. Alas, the support is about the same now as it was then, making it rather "useless" if you want to, there's that word again, *support* a variety of users. Further to the kickback theories (something other than common sense is obviously going on), it is quite strange that Photoshop/Imageready team has also been so slow in developing for it. When I wrote that guide, you had to sort through the tech specs for the actual format (found on the web) to have any sort of semi-informed clue as to what the options in the Save As dialog box meant; Adobe had not even bothered to properly document it – that's how sold on the idea of PNG they were, and curiously remain.

If my memory serves me right, PNG also has the ablility to support more than 8-bit pallettes of indexed color (???). Although trim is always good, GIF is in many ways an obsolete format with fat pipes covering more and more of the western world. (PNG does GIF and MORE!) I am probably not the only one tired of faking transparencies with GIF grids applied as background-image (the other standard trick not mentioned). Not that we need more browsers with their own ways of interpreting code and supporting formats, but then again…

-af