New Animated PNG Creation Tools Intend To Bring APNG Into Mainstream Use 246
Kagetsuki writes "While grainy GIF images can have entertaining uses, they aren't the ideal animated image format due to lack of full color support and an alpha channel [for varied transparency]. Animated PNG doesn't have these faults and has been available and incorporated in quite a few browsers since roughly 2004. Lack of tools and recognition has hurt adoption, so to remedy this there is a campaign on Kickstarter to create an Open Source, high quality Animated PNG [APNG] conversion library and GUI Editor based on the APNG Assembler tool 'apngasm.' Even the primary goal includes libraries/modules for C/C++ and Ruby along with a cross platform GUI authoring tool. Aside from supporting the project simply using APNG willl help raise interest and support in the standard and bring us one step closer to a world with cleaner animated images."
Re:The problem is size limits (Score:2, Informative)
Most sites that use animated GIFs have restrictions on size and dimensions (typically 500x500 1MB). The quality of APNG within those restrictions won't be any better.
PNG uses substantially better compression technology than GIF (a two pass algorithm with a pixel value predictor in the first and then compressing the errors after the first pass in the second using deflate, which combines LZ77 dictionary encoding and an adaptive huffman coder, versus straightforward LZW, which is only a dictionary coder), so this is not really true. You can achieve a lot more in a 1MB PNG than a 1MB GIF.
Re:quite a few browsers? (Score:3, Informative)
Because PNG beats the pants off of GIF in terms of file size.
Re:quite a few browsers? (Score:5, Informative)
Couple of reasons
1. Better compression.
2. 24-bit support (still with pretty good compression).
3. 8-bit alpha channel with 24-bit RGB.
Re:quite a few browsers? (Score:5, Informative)
BMP, TIF, TGA, EXR, WEBP, various 'raw' formats.
Each of which are either stupidly larger than PNG, require decoders with much larger memory footprints to account for all the features of the format that are entirely useless in a web browser (this is supposed to be a format for the web, not a goddamned CMYK printing press), or are blindly hated due to being supported by one or more Evil-Companies-Of-The-Month(tm). Nice try, though.
Re: what happened to MNG? (Score:2, Informative)
Developer ego together with a healthy dose of "not invented here" syndrome is what happened. MNG was removed from Firefox by Stuart Parmenter "to save download size" (without libmng, the Firefox download would save 200 KB back in the days when Firefox was considered the "lean version" of Mozilla). He then proceeded to instead propose APNG with vlad to effectively replace the GIF standard for animation without relying on MNG by applying custom patches to libpng.
Needless to say, when Mozilla brought the APNG extension for ratification to the PNG people, they rejected it because a) PNG was "meant to store only one image" and b) MNG already existed as a standard to accomplish the very same goals by the same people. As a result, the official libpng distribution (and WebKit which depends on it) does not support APNG.
A few people tried to bridge the gap by proposing changes to APNG to placate the PNG people or allowing plugin discovery to work for tags as it does for tags, but these were both rejected by Mozilla in favor of backwards compatibility and, I assume, complexity reasons respectively, so I don't really see any reason why the gap will be bridged any time soon.
Re:quite a few browsers? (Score:5, Informative)
Why is PNG needed any more, anyway? It was only developed because of Unisys patents. GIF patents expired years ago.
The LZW patents were the impetus for PNG, but PNG is superior in every possible way... except that PNG skipped animation, because animated GIFs didn't seem like an important use case to support. (As I recall, their primary use at the time was badly pixelated spinning red alarm lights on Geocities pages.)
Re:quite a few browsers? (Score:5, Informative)
What about MNG?
If APNG is a screwdriver MNG is a Swiss Army Knife with all sorts of little tools, one of which being a screwdriver head that is sort of awkward and difficult to use. MNG has a lot of compelling features that sound great but the reality is all these features made MNG difficult to implement. MNG isn't a simple [screwdriver] "frame based" format. Instead it has a bunch of small embedded tools [Swiss Army Knife] to create animations. For example it contains individual image objects/sprites and these are manipulated through some sort of animation instruction system that is embedded in the image - and variations of sprites are stored as delta fragments, and there's additional support for these fragments to be in transparent JPG which is a questionable standard on its own and seems self defeating in a PNG based standard...? If you want just a frame based animated image APNG does the job and is simpler, if you want a complex format that has individual image fragments and scripted action then SVG+SMIL is your solution; MNG is too complex to outdo APNG and too inflexible to outdo SVG+SMIL.
Re:quite a few browsers? (Score:3, Informative)
Well, no wonders Firefox support it - accordingly to Wikipedia, APNG was created by two guys at Mozilla.
For other browsers... well, this kind of thing usually steamrolls (more use > more users > more browser support > more use), so the beginning is slow, but the animation tools in the article may help to boost it a bit.
Re:quite a few browsers? (Score:4, Informative)
Because not all images are square. Objects that aren't square (like a star for example), if you wanted to place that star on a page, and didn't have alpha transparency, you could use GIF, but the edges would look weird because it's either all on or all off transparency which creates jaggy edges. With alpha transparency you can make the object's edges more transparent as it gets closer to the edge which will let it look right no matter what type of background you have. Of course there are many other uses, like semi-transparent effects, shadows, etc that aren't easily replicated another way.
These type things allow a webpage to reuse assets over and over across many pages, or in many different sections of the same page, which reduces the amount of image manipulation you have to do, and also reduces the size of the page which is more and more important as devices with low bandwidth become more prominent (like phones/tablets).