Re: [CSS21] Test Suite

> As I mentioned earlier, GIF's may be inferior from a standards and personal
> preference perspective, but they seem to be far more widely deployed.  This
> is a direct consequence (IMHO) of their broader, more consistent rendering
> in existing UA's.

I think the real reasons are:

- ignorance - most authors have no real understanding of the technology
  they use - most just copy the existing practice - I think it is still
  the case that most HTML authors don't understand gamma, as there are
  stil a lot of gamma 1.0 or Mac gamma images in use;

- GIF is good enough for what it is used for, basically transparent images
  and small buttons - combined with natural inertia it means that people
  will continue to use the worse format;

- the cost impact of the patent issue to commercial users is negligible and
  non-commercial users may not care about infringing the patents;

- the dominant browser doesn't implement transparency, and transparency is one
  of the main reasons for using GIF.

Only the issue here relating to consistency of implementation is the last one.

(JPEG also has similar problems; many, probably most, second line authors 
(those used by the vast majority of web sites) will use JPEG for any large
image, including screen shots, even though screen shots are almost always
smaller and better in GIF or PNG.)

PS Please do not send huge attachments to public mailing lists,
especially with un-useful media types (not only is the true content
type not identified, but nor is the fact that there is a secondary, TAR,
wrapper, not even by filename conventions.  For smaller sources attach
them as plain text, preferably not in base64 transfer encoding.

Sending any attachments to such lists, these days, risks having the mail
suppressed by virus defences.

Received on Saturday, 24 July 2004 04:13:05 UTC