- From: Ray Foulkes <Ray.Foulkes@sema.fr>
- Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1998 15:27:20 +0100
- To: www-amaya@w3.org
Subject PNG "I think PNG is intended to be the replacement format to GIF, as it's more efficient." I believe that the main reason for the development and support of PNG by W3C was that GIF contains a patented algorithm owned by Unisys. They enforce licencing of the patent. Visit their web site to see the licence conditions. PNG was an alternative developed by a large community of software engineers and put in the public domain (I think). I am told that PNG has better interlacing and transparency and greater compression than GIF but less compression than JPEG and no animation. See URL http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-png Go to http://www.group42.com/develop.htm for a free implementation in C for PNG. Go to http://webreview.com/97/05/09/feature/pngeditors.html for a list of graphic editors supporting PNG. So, unless you wish to licence the algorithm (LZW) for a product, use PNG.
Received on Friday, 16 October 1998 09:27:16 UTC