Coming Soon to a Browser Near You: PNG
by Heather Champ
The W3C Graphics formats for the World-Wide Web states: "The World Wide Web is a multimedia information space. This means that one of the design issues is to deal with the various data formats. In addition to HTML and other textual formats, since the widespread availability of NCSA Mosaic and other visual interfaces to the web, more and more of the web's information is represented or augmented with data in any number of popular graphics formats."The most popular formats to date--GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format, pronounced with a hard g, although some liken the format to a popular peanut butter brand) and JPGs (Joint Photographic Experts Group, pronounced "jay-peg")--will have strong competition from the PNG (Portable Networks Graphics, pronounced "ping") format.
Earlier this week Siegel & Gale released a beta version of their new graphics viewer PNG Live 2.0 (Windows 95/NT) that promises to radically expand the options for designers creating images for the Web. Seigel & Gale began to develop the viewer after the GIF scare of 1995 when Unisys announced that it would be suing for patent fees for all developers of GIF software because of GIFs' use of proprietary LZW compression. PNG is a royalty-free, W3C-recommended image format.
PNG images are not restricted to the 216 "Internet safe" colors that presently challenge the most talented of designers. These new images can handle up to 42-bit color, which, although beyond the reach of most users' systems, among other things means that designers can create and develop designs truer to the client brand. Both Adobe Photoshop 4.0 and Debabelizer 4.0 support PNG natively.
Other Key Features
- Speed: PNG uses a newer and different compression method. If you were to take the graphics of an existing site, rendered in the new format, there would be a 10% to 30% increase in speed. If a site were developed with PNG, CSS, and the 1.1 HTTP standard in mind, there is the potential to see download speeds increase up to 8 to 10 times.
- Alpha-channel transparency: One of the most time-consuming efforts of a designer is creating the same image that will be transparentized over a variety of backgrounds. With Alpha-channel transparency, PNG images are capable of being repurposed given the many levels of "relative" transparency.
- Gamma Correction: PNG images are dynamically corrected for cross-platform changes, which will ensure a more consistent user experience.
Designers and developers ever fearful of even the most popular plug-ins and the possible loss of traffic from gun-shy users should note that PNG Live 2.0 is one of the first of a new breed of plug-ins that has been designed to take advantage of Netscape's new plug-in API, which includes layering of semi-transparent images but more importantly the auto install feature.
The Mac version should be released by the end of the second quarter.
