GIFs have transparency, but not alpha blending so it would have jagged edges. When PNGs were first supported by IE, you had to do some crazy ActiveX scripting calls to make it work.
At the time, Microsoft had shut down the IE team since they had beaten Netscape in the browser wars. If it hadn’t been for Firefox, we would be stuck with that crappy PNG implementation!
Today’s kids don’t understand the struggle of 8 color gifs
Neither do today’s adults, since gifs always allowed up to 256 colors. (The “8” you’re probably thinking of was the number of bits per pixel.)
You’re right, but I’m still technically right too ;)
We used gif before png
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TGA! ALL THE WAY!
I’ve never used tga in my life
Back in the day I was a graphics professional. A targa file with alpha was the way. I’m old. 😄
They also used targa files in the first Mortal Kombat games.
Gifs: am i a joke to you?
PNGs: No, you just weren’t alpha enough!
G g g gif, the one bit alpha wonder
That was the world long after PNG was invented since IE didn’t support it for years, and the majority of people and all the businesses used IE.
Anyone else remember when people hated PNG like they hate WEBP today, for the same reason; namely lack of wide-spread software support?
JXL is just better than WEBP
JpegXL is definitely better overall, especially for its texture-preserving features, but it’s even less supported than webp :(
How about 4096+RGB channels?
PNG was built to replace GIF and TIFF.
The Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format was designed to replace the older and simpler GIF format and, to some extent, the much more complex TIFF format.
And it stands to this day, with the exception of animation:
One GIF feature that PNG does not try to reproduce is multiple-image support, especially animations; PNG was and is intended to be a single-image format only.
Though APNG came later, and we even have MP4.
http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngintro.html
Bonus:
No detail was too small for consideration in the authors’ quest for a near-perfect image format; yea, verily, even the acronym and pronunciation were major topics of discussion. The reason, of course, is the GIF format; some pronounce it with a soft G like giraffe, some with a hard G like gift, and no one really knows what they’re talking about. (For the record, the soft G is correct; it is how the author of the format pronounces it.)
“PNG” is always spelled* “PNG” (or “Portable Network Graphics”) and always pronounced “ping” in English, not “pinj” or “pee en gee” or any other multi-syllabic disaster. (For non-English speakers, the three-letter pronunciation is fine, however.)
Never heard anyone pronounce it ping, lol! P-N-G is a better pronunciation anyway. Less ambiguous, there’s already something called ping that is super common in computing.
Funfact: APNG is now stadardized as part of third edition of PNG spec
with the exception of animation.
Funny you should mention that… From the GIF89 specification, Appendix D:
Animation - The Graphics Interchange Format is not intended as a platform for animation, even though it can be done in a limited way.
Nah, they just had the interns rotoscoping everything manually
No, I wasn’t blessed. My modeling career is still a work in progress.
And we still can’t agree on how to pronounce PNG. The inventer says PNG… case closed degenerates.
Itt: people who missed the joke
They should have put superman after the plane. “It’s a bird…it’s a plane…it’s… its” was literally things we said in the 1990s.
