• @BeefPiano
    link
    English
    571 year ago

    GIFs have transparency, but not alpha blending so it would have jagged edges. When PNGs were first supported by IE, you had to do some crazy ActiveX scripting calls to make it work.

    At the time, Microsoft had shut down the IE team since they had beaten Netscape in the browser wars. If it hadn’t been for Firefox, we would be stuck with that crappy PNG implementation!

  • Herr Woland
    link
    561 year ago

    Today’s kids don’t understand the struggle of 8 color gifs

    • @grue
      link
      English
      321 year ago

      Neither do today’s adults, since gifs always allowed up to 256 colors. (The “8” you’re probably thinking of was the number of bits per pixel.)

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      11
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      the only time i think I ever interacted with targa files was with team fortress 2, and probably valve games in general

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        21 year ago

        Back in the day I was a graphics professional. A targa file with alpha was the way. I’m old. 😄

        • Fat Tony
          link
          1
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          They also used targa files in the first Mortal Kombat games.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      3
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      My favourite in simplicity is still xpm (X PixMap) format. You can draw that in your text editor. XFCE’s window manager still uses it for borders.

    • @Downcount
      link
      281 year ago

      PNGs: No, you just weren’t alpha enough!

  • @mvirts
    link
    191 year ago

    G g g gif, the one bit alpha wonder

  • @ShortFuse
    link
    151 year ago

    PNG was built to replace GIF and TIFF.

    The Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format was designed to replace the older and simpler GIF format and, to some extent, the much more complex TIFF format.

    And it stands to this day, with the exception of animation:

    One GIF feature that PNG does not try to reproduce is multiple-image support, especially animations; PNG was and is intended to be a single-image format only.

    Though APNG came later, and we even have MP4.

    http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngintro.html

    Bonus:

    No detail was too small for consideration in the authors’ quest for a near-perfect image format; yea, verily, even the acronym and pronunciation were major topics of discussion. The reason, of course, is the GIF format; some pronounce it with a soft G like giraffe, some with a hard G like gift, and no one really knows what they’re talking about. (For the record, the soft G is correct; it is how the author of the format pronounces it.)

    “PNG” is always spelled* “PNG” (or “Portable Network Graphics”) and always pronounced “ping” in English, not “pinj” or “pee en gee” or any other multi-syllabic disaster. (For non-English speakers, the three-letter pronunciation is fine, however.)

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      221 year ago

      Never heard anyone pronounce it ping, lol! P-N-G is a better pronunciation anyway. Less ambiguous, there’s already something called ping that is super common in computing.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      41 year ago

      Odd they bring up TIFF. That one is more like a container format that can hold many different types of images.

    • @uis
      link
      41 year ago

      Funfact: APNG is now stadardized as part of third edition of PNG spec

    • @thomasloven
      link
      2
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      with the exception of animation.

      Funny you should mention that… From the GIF89 specification, Appendix D:

      Animation - The Graphics Interchange Format is not intended as a platform for animation, even though it can be done in a limited way.

    • @RememberTheApollo_
      link
      101 year ago

      Ugh. I was so happy when jpg or gifs came Into common use. bmp and tif files took so long to load.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      61 year ago

      Back in the 90s, I was asked to critique a local business web site. I noticed a picture wasn’t loading correctly on Netscape Navigator when it was working fine on IE. Turned out, the designer had stuck in a 5MB BMP image. This when a whole lot of people were still on 56K modems.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      61 year ago

      My scanner defaults to .tiff for some reason if I scan from the button and it cannot be changed. Have to scan from gnome-document-scanner if I want different formats.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          11 year ago

          Good to know, didn’t realize it was lossless! For me the format I usually need my scans in is pdf, but that is useful info!

    • @uis
      link
      3
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Fuck no

  • @Heavybell
    link
    English
    151 year ago

    Anyone else remember when people hated PNG like they hate WEBP today, for the same reason; namely lack of wide-spread software support?

    • @uis
      link
      71 year ago

      JXL is just better than WEBP

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        41 year ago

        JpegXL is definitely better overall, especially for its texture-preserving features, but it’s even less supported than webp :(

        • @uis
          link
          11 year ago

          How about 4096+RGB channels?

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      41 year ago

      PNG mainly lacked support from Microsoft (Internet Explorer) and Adobe (Photoshop). IE didn’t handle PNG transparency, while Photoshop had a shitty PNG implementation that tended to produce files larger than an equivalent GIF. Held back widespread adoption for almost a decade.

  • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
    link
    121 year ago

    That was the world long after PNG was invented since IE didn’t support it for years, and the majority of people and all the businesses used IE.

  • @Cort
    link
    101 year ago

    Nah, they just had the interns rotoscoping everything manually

  • @lanolinoil
    link
    English
    61 year ago

    Itt: people who missed the joke