IBM Quick Reference Guide - 1992

Certainly lots more features, which in actually a reason to avoid it, at least to me. PNG 1.1's spec is three times the size of GIF 89's (comparing a text file I have lying around for GIF89 versus RFC2083 for PNG); just glancing over the table of contents for RFC2083, it looks like second-system effect applied to TIFF. It is approximately impossible to implement PNG compactly; you need something functionally equivalent to zlib (see the first bullet point in RFC2083 section 12.3); pngtopnm is some three to four times the size of giftopnm. (I find pngtopnm is 128981 bytes versus giftopnm at 31373 bytes, a factor of 4.11+; after stripping symbol tables, 96016 versus 25480 bytes, a factor of 3.626- - and while shared libraries make this comparison unfair, they do so in png's favour, for the pngtopnm I looked at is linked shared against libm and libc, while the giftopnm, only libc.) Nitpick: I don't think GIF is patented anywhere. Rather, it uses Lempel-Ziv-Welch compression, and *that* is patented - or at least was; I don't know enough about patent expiration times in various jurisdictions to know where its patents have died. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B