Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com