The PNG side to GIF
The PNG side to GIF
The PNG side to GIF
Brief history
Above all, know that PNG is pronounced ping. The idea to replace the GIF appeared in early 1995 when Unisys announced that it held a patent on the compression format used by the IPF. In addition, this format is already older at the time, we decided to find a successor. This format will be some time after a recommendation from W3C.
Advantages of PNG
PNG has many advantages over GIF: it is lighter, more powerful, more reliable and under free license.
Lightness
PNG uses a non-destructive compression format that is to say that the picture quality is not thereby affected. Generally, a PNG image 8 is 5-50% lighter than the same format GIF. Only very small images with few colours may be lighter in GIF.
Power
Where GIF offers only one choice of colours and transparency binary (opaque / transparent) PNG has a range. The smallest, PNG 8, is on a par with its predecessor by offering 256 colours and transparency binary. But there are formats allowing a greater number of colours and especially gradual transparency levels of 256 or more.
Reliability
This format allows some improvements such as gamma correction or colour. For non-specialists, it is actually stored in the image parameters helping to display images on an almost identical regardless of the system or tool used. Those who have seen the same image on a PC and a Mac or just over 2 different monitors know what I mean.
Freedom
PNG is under a free license to reproduce does not see the unpleasant surprise of a patent related to the GIF LZW compression. It should be noted that this patent has fallen into the public domain but across the Atlantic at the time of writing this article, it is still valid in Europe. Valid is to be taken with caution since software patents have no legal existence in Europe.
The reasons for success late
Given all its advantages, it is reasonable to ask why PNG has not yet taken over the old GIF. There are several possible (bad) reasons.
Habit
Yep, habit, laziness or simple lack of information sufficient to cripple a format that has yet to win anything.
Tools
Here the problem is more difficult. Unfortunately, the two major tools in terms of reputation that are Photoshop and MSIE / Win suffer from penalizing gaps.
Photoshop, first, compress poorly PNG. Indeed, this format has several levels of compression, 0-9 and Photoshop is stuck at 6 without it being possible to change this setting in the options. The compression is non-destructive level 9 provides the same image rendered while being much lighter. Similarly, the images created with this software does not seem to take into account the gamma correction properly.
Internet Explorer for Windows, meanwhile, does not support PNG 24, but manages very well the PNG 8. It is therefore not possible to use images with a gradual transparency on this browser. The Macintosh version does not suffer from this handicap. And again, the gamma seems to be incorrect.
Conclusion
Currently, it is quite possible to replace a GIF PNG provided to employ the same conditions. About weight problems, just use a little freeware cleaning behind Photoshop or using a more powerful tool in this respect, like Gimp.
The most innovative push to use the vice gradual transparency, to make a dynamic menu revealing the contents of the page below, for example. For this, we must ensure, as for the CSS MSIE / Win degrades the desired effect without adversely affecting the result.
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