Article

Home » Design and Layout » Design Principles » Daylight Robbery Part 2: Case Study - the Humble GIF

Daylight Robbery Part 2: Case Study - the Humble GIF

Page: 1 2

As site developers have to take into consideration the use of older browsers by a significant part of their audience, many have chosen to avoid using PNGs. Others have put the format to use, and insist that their audience upgrade their browsers as needed. As for MNG files, they're not well supported. The format was finally given concrete specifications in January 2001 and is ready for use; unfortunately, none of the major browsers fully supports MNG as yet. Netscape 6 does support MNGs relatively well, but neither MSIE nor Opera supports the format at all. The Unix/KDE browser Konqueror supports MNGs, but the market share of Konqueror is quite small.

My guess is until Microsoft decides to support the MNG format in its browser, the usage of MNGs on the Web will be extremely limited at best. And Glenn Randers-Pehrson, one of MNG’s developers, doesn’t expect the MNG format to win the support of the major browsers anytime soon. "Based on how long it’s taken them to support PNG," he says, "I don’t have high hopes." ExtremeTech recommends using Flash animation in place of MNG files.

PNGs are superior to GIFs in many ways. They are lossless graphics, which means that no image detail is destroyed. They compress better than either GIFs or JPGs, which means smaller file size and faster download times. And they support a much bigger color palette than GIFs, and also feature platform-independent gamma correction (which means they look pretty much the same on your PC as well as your neighbor’s Mac), multiple transparency layers as opposed to the single layer supported by GIFs, text area within the file for data (read copyright) storage, and more.

Currently a relatively small number of sites employ PNGs. Eventually they may well augment or even supplant GIF usage, but that day isn’t here yet. As more graphics designers turn to the PNG format, PNG graphics will become more and more common. Personally, I don’t foresee GIFs disappearing for the near future, especially as long as the mainstream graphics programs such as Paint Shop and Illustrator continue to support the format.