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Comment by MLR | Hacker News Reader

Would've been great to see this happen five years, seems like it's largely irrelevant now with the prevalence of HTML5 video compression for short clips.

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That's what we have in 2015:

https://www.google.com/logos/doodles/2015/st-patricks-day-20...

Or something similar to this - http://gfycat.com/SomeUnkemptKrill

Slight quality loss admittedly, but a huge bandwidth saving and I believe supported across all browsers now.

I'll admit however I didn't think about some other advantages of PNG (transparency for one), which would mean it was more suitable in some situations.

Well at least on iOS the video requires a tap to play and then promptly goes fullscreen (requiring another two taps to dismiss)

For photorealistic video yes, but APNG is much more suited than anything else for animated graphics where SVG isn't a good fit.

Do you have examples where APNG wins compression-wise relative to H.264?

JPEG usually wins over PNG compression-wise, but in some use cases it makes sense to use PNG.

The same thing with animation/video.

Suited in terms of desired quality, not necessarily file size. Sometimes you need pixel perfect frames, not 4:2:2 b-frame messiness.

If nothing else, this lets you make loading spinners with proper alpha-blended antialiased edges (so you don't need "dark background" and "light background" versions).

Indeed, as far as I know, most video formats currently playable in browsers don't support transparency at all.

Hardly. Mobile Safari just added APNG, and web video is still not going to be as convenient as images for some time to come.

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