[Wikipedia-l] Re: PNG format???

Fri Jul 25 12:08:59 UTC 2003

Ralphem at aol.com wrote:

> JPEG AND GIF are the standards for use on the web

In addition to what other people have already mentioned (JPEG is lossy 
and thus unsuitable for logos and other discrete-tone graphics; GIF is 
(currently) patent-contaminated and therefore cannot be used with GFDL), 
I would also like to point out that GIF has a lot of actual technical 
limitations that, in themselves, already make it not a choice for most 
application:
* Limited to 256 colours
   * Therefore, in a sense, also lossy. A >256 colour image will need to
     be reduced in colour depth. This results in dithering or diffusion,
     which greatly hurts the compression ratio
* Only single-colour transparency
* gzip compression (which PNG uses) often outperforms the patented
   LZW compression (which GIF uses)

I really hate GIF. Does it show?

Timwi