On Sat, 15 Jan 2005, Michel Py wrote:
William, get a life. Recommending using .PNG with the rendering problem
it has is outright wrong:
No - actually PNG is better graphical format technically then GIF and so
moving in the future to PNGs makes sense no matter the patent issue with GIF.
The reason why it may not work well now (and only for very few cases),
does not have anything to do with format itself but with bad programming
by folks at Redmond. Of course there are other options available for what
people can browse internet with and this is hardly the only issue with
their product (security issues are a lot more serious).
the only thing it achieves is to make you
appear as an utopist dreamer fighting battles that have been lost long.
I'm certainly an "utopist dreamer" :) but I generally fight only the
battles where there is some chance of winning. As far as GIFs and Unisys
most actually consider it a battle that was won - they suffered very big
as far as public relations (something they likely will never be able to
fix). They are now seen by most as one of the worst cases of corporate
america greed, company that can not be trusted and went back on its word
(from 1995 not to go after those using non-commercial gif generating
program). And they got nothing out of it too - their claims have pretty
much been ignored (you had given good examples of that...) and they got
no serious money from their claims - many laughed right in their face and
others started promoting PNGs and their use spread (which as I mention is
actually good not bad for the world in general - seriously jump-started
what was previously going to be a very very very slow transition process).
--
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net