Re: PNG as a requirement

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> 
> http://corp2.unisys.com/LeadStory/lzw-license.html
> 
> may I suggest that the SVG spec strongly recommends
> all SVG implementors to provide PNG support.

It does rather more than that, in fact [1]:

|>   The <image> element indicates that the contents of a complete
|>   file should be rendered into a given rectangle within the current
|>   user coordinate system. The <image> element can refer to
|>   raster image files such as PNG or JPEG or to files with MIME
|>   type of "image/svg". Conforming SVG viewers need to support
|>   at least PNG, JPEG and SVG format files. 


So, PNG support is a conformance requirement.

> (personally, I wouldn't mind if GIF support was
> to be considered as a bug, but that's me ;-)

;-)

Its not required, but it is not explicitly disallowed either. Perhaps it
should be, since even freeware is required to pay a license fee for GIF
decoding, and Web sites are required to pay a fee for hosting GIFs that
were not provably produced with licensed software [2].

[1]  http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/struct.html#ImageElement
[2]  http://corp2.unisys.com/LeadStory/lzw-license.html
     http://corp2.unisys.com/LeadStory/lzwfaq.html

--
Chris

Received on Friday, 27 August 1999 09:35:10 UTC