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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

APNG started in 2004, I am not sure why it took so long, 13 years before it is landed in Webkit and Blink / Chromium. The fight with MNG only lasted few years. PNG rejected the APNG proposal multiple times ( Why ? )

This is 2017, and when we look forward to 2020, we still dont have anything to replace gif, jpeg, apng, png. With Video we went from MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ( Divx, Xvid, Rmvb, WMV, VP8 era ) H.264/AV to H.265/HEVC. Our Screen went from Low Res to 4K.

Surely all these browser Vendor can sit down and at least talk about this. How about supporting bpg for a start?

And lastly, I was naively thinking having APNG now would means x years before it is roll out to large number of consumers. But to my surprise even Chrome has a very high usage in China, 60% and growing. China is historically a region of IE6, I remember IE was still 40 - 50% in 2013 or 2014. You could now start to use APNG and soon have 60%+ of your users seeing it. Amazing.

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> PNG rejected the APNG proposal multiple times ( Why ? )

Because it is not a still image, and therefore should have a different file signature, MIME type, and file name extension. It is simply out of scope for PNG. When designing PNG as a replacement for GIF, they very deliberately and decidedly dropped the animation feature. Implementing APNG as an extension of PNG confuses categories that should not be confused.

> When designing PNG as a replacement for GIF, they very deliberately and decidedly dropped the animation feature.

The goal was to replace GIFs. And look what happened: "GIF" became synonymous with "animation".

The main goal was to create a patent-free replacement for GIF, with a number of improvements for its main uses. GIF animation was not used much at that moment.

Still, it's not like it was impossible to make some last minute changes, while PNG was still relatively young. See https://boutell.com/innards/apng.html

Thanks for that link.

You have to admit it's a little funny that if PNG's one goal in life was to replace GIF, they chose to not support the one thing GIF is used for today.

You had one job PNG. One job!

The popularity of animated GIFs, or the use at any scale of them at all really, only came after PNG was finalized.

The design of PNG started in January 1995 and PNG 1.0 was published in October 1996. Netscape Navigator added animated GIF support in September 1995, and if I remember correctly, it wasn't immediately used at large scale. Anyway, by that time, the PNG team had IIRC already decided to put animation in a yet-to-be-designed MNG.

And to be fair GIF was used in many many places where we now use PNG.

None the less, a funny end result.

PNG successfully replaced GIFs. It is because of the decision not to support animations that GIF became a synonym for animations.

> This is 2017, and when we look forward to 2020, we still dont have anything to replace gif, jpeg, apng, png.

> How about supporting bpg for a start?

There’s FLIF ( http://flif.info/ ) with very promising compression results when compared against WebP, BPG, PNG and lossless JPEG. It also supports animations, which I linked to elsewhere in this thread. Seems like the format is also nearly complete.

webp still doesn't show up in iOS Safari!

Too bad, I can't put simple vimeo previews that work on all web browsers as a result.

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