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May 29th, 2007
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Use of GIF images

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I'm still not convinced that GIF is any use other than for animation though, it's use in the past i can understand, but other than the fact that PNG does not support animation and MNG hasn't really taken off (probably because gif is free now?), the only thing that still has me going the way of PNG is this.

extract from wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Uni...nt_enforcement
See 'Alternatives' section
PNG offers better compression and more features than GIF.
The format has replaced GIF in many instances where true-color imaging, alpha transparency and a lossless data format are required.
and this:
identical 8-bit (or lower) image data rendered in PNG and GIF formats should yield similar sizes.

is there really a need to use both GIF and PNG when we can simply adopt MNG!?

It seems to me that the way to go, for reasons discussed above, is with PNG, even if GIF is legal now, just because GIF is now free, all that does is give us a sigh of relief over the images we allready have.

I think that the only thing which needs to be addressed now is MNG.
Is MNG better than GIF89a's animation feature and why hasn't there been widespread adoption of it?
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May 30th, 2007
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Re: Use of GIF images

PNG transparency doesn't work well for me in a webpage context on Microsoft Internet Explorer <= 6; PNG background transparent images have a grey background instead (notably; my connection does funny compression things to all images; but it only seems to negatively affect IE). If that issue was fixed; I would certainly use PNG instead; it's a superior format. However; I still need to make pages work correctly and look correct in MY Internet Explorer 6; so I bite the bullet, turn dithering to max, and stick with websafe-pallete GIF for now.

On the web these days; formats are only widely adopted by site developers if they are adopted by ALL relevant browser developers, and correctly...
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May 30th, 2007
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Re: Use of GIF images

thats coz IE <6 doesn't support it, and it is solved in newer IE
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May 30th, 2007
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Re: Use of GIF images

Indeed; but until it isn't; IE Version 6 is a big target platform, and I can't tell any client to upgrade their browser and expect to keep them. I wish I could! I'd get the whole world on Opera if I had the chance.

I'm sure this 'problem' will fix itself soon enough; but I imagine there'll still be die hard browsers (in context of users) and designers who stick with GIF until IE6 is long dead and buried.

I tend to follow this policy:

- PNG for background images; or images with no transparency that shouldn't be lossy compressed.
- GIF for anything that should have a transparent background; ( unless I know that it's only going to be on one color background and where that one color background is a part of a PNG; in which case, I'd use PNG with a fake background ), and in the rare case where I'd use an animation.
- JPG for anything else.
Last edited by MattEvans; May 30th, 2007 at 11:06 am.
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Re: Use of GIF images

i had assumed people would stay up to date in case any security issues had been resolved. but then i realised this is microsoft we're talking about. and security and microsoft don't exactly make sense in the same sentence do they, well not without an army of resource hogging applications standing guard at least hehe

funny how the biggest browser out there is about the only one who havn't remedied this yet. crazy


what do you think about these MNG's? do you know if any IE's can support it? i don't think i've even seen an MNG yet.
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Jun 7th, 2007
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Re: Use of GIF images

i cant say ive seen an MNG but if you wish to achieve animation why not just use flash ? i know it requires users to have aplugin, but nowadays id like to bet a good 90% of users have flash installed.
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Jun 7th, 2007
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Re: Use of GIF images

i don't have flash (on my favorite browser, out of choice), besides, using flash to replace simple animated gifs is mega-overkill, and flash doesn't work well atall with CSS (each 'movie' has to be hard-coded into individual pages)..

SVG looks promising if it's taken up by all relevant parties... it's not only pretty, static, scalable vector images; it can be manipulated with client-side script, it could feasibly be controlled on a very fine basis using a CSS -type technology; and it's an open, W3C, standard, unlike flash.
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Jun 12th, 2007
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Re: Use of GIF images

Flash will never be the answer to replace gifs in the animated sense. It is just moving further and further away from it.

PNGs on the other hand are really good but IE6 is still a huge part of the web user population.

Gif is gonna be here to stay for the next year or 2. Probably until IE8 .
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Jun 12th, 2007
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Re: Use of GIF images

im not saying it is right. but flash has become easier and easier to implement with each subsequent release adding more features and in the world of web2.0 pages higher bandwidth and resources, the overkill of flash or possibly other similiar animation techniques will outway the negative affects.
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Jun 12th, 2007
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Re: Use of GIF images

It's not so much 'bandwidth overkill', Flash is good in terms of filesize; often smaller than bitmaps ( including gifs ) and even movie formats; considering images in Flash are usually vectors and fills, and SWFs are highly compressed.

The only real problem is forced separation from the rest of the ( HTML ) page... By design; SWFs aren't images, and have to be embedded as objects directly into HTM or viewed standalone; thus they can't replace image formats in all contexts ( i.e. CSS ). That 'issue' will likely never be resolved; because it isn't what SWF sets out to be.

The <img> tag in HTML can always be replaced with some block level element with a background image; meaning that site GUIs that make heavy use of images can be smaller and neater in markup, and under CSS control. This isn't possible with SWF objects. They have to be on each every page and each one has a reasonably sized lump of <object><?delegate> markup. That's a structural drawback in my eyes that can't be fixed; however fast data is sent.
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