29 Jan
2006
29 Jan
'06
10:11 p.m.
> I didn't see anything in the original request
that called for
> anything PNG can do but GIF can't,
Reasons to use PNG over GIF:
- Better compression with faster decompression speeds
(PNG uses LZ77,
GIF uses LZ78)
You need to go reread the spec. GIF uses LZW, Lempel-Ziv-Welch, a
significant extension to LZ.
- Color depths *above* 8-bit (ie. 24-bit color)
- Alpha channel (256 levels of transparancy)
Neither of these appeared to matter from what I could see. If either
is necessary, PNG may indeed be called for.
Now that PNG is in all still-maintained graphics
programs and web
browsers, there is no reason to use GIF at all moving forward.
Really? Who did that survey of graphics programs, where did you find
it, and how did they miss mine? Or are you defining "still-maintained"
to be a subset of "has acquired PNG support by now" (thereby making it
mean something drastically different from what it appears to mean based
on the words making it up)?
It's
philosophically similar to Occam's Razor, [...]
You're mis-applying
Occam's Razor here. We're talking about file
formats, not programs.