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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this throws me back to the early 90s, when we would basically have the same discussions about JPEG vs GIF. At the time most graphics programs could open a GIF you downloaded with your modem, but if you wanted to view a JPEG you had to jump out to a separate program, and everyone said that as soon as there was native JPEG support no one would use GIF anymore.

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If people said that then they were silly, because JPEG and GIF solve different problems. JPEG didn't displace GIF because JPEG doesn't actually do a good job of compressing the images that GIF is good at compressing. Note that once a format came along that was good at those, namely PNG, it did displace GIF pretty much entirely for the still-image use case.

Does anyone know why the APNG format was rejected by the PNG group? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG)

It seems like a great replacement for animated GIFs.

APNG was rejected primarily because it used image/png when it was clearly a video, and the WG felt that images shouldn't handle video. When video/png was offered instead, Mozilla rejected that because it felt backwards compatibility was more important.

So, basically, it was rejected due to a pissing contest on the least important part of the specification.

libpng is a reference implementation of the PNG format. They don't have to support every third-party extension.

But libpng provides callback methods for "unknown" chucks, so the application can read and handle them. So it's possible to process APNG with libpng.

Hah yep given how long GIF has persisted, I think it's clear that nobody cares about what is the best format in terms of technical achievement. It's all about what is most compatible.

Pretty much.

Q @ anyone whom chimes in: what format(s) do sites use for silent, live-action backgrounds to make their websites and apps seem friendlier?

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