What's with .PNG?

[JennaWrenn]

I was working on an image in Paint, and I always save it as JPG to get smaller filesizes. This one paticular one was giving me problems because it looked way too fuzzy after being compressed into a jpeg. I played around with the different filetypes to see if I could find one that wouldn't it make it quite as blurry but not as big as a bitmap, and I discovered PNG. It didn't blur the image like a jpeg usally does, but it made the file size close to 1/10 the size of a 24-bit bmp. Can someone tell me how this works or if there are any downsides to using PNG? Surely there must be. At first it seemed like a miracle filetype. I can get some examples if you want...

[cpalemme]

PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics and is a bitmap image format that uses a "lossless data compression", that is, no quality loss. It was invented to improve and replace GIF images, however, the only downside is that transparency is not supported by IE 6 yet, that's it! For more information google a bit :)

[chesemonkyloma]

also, it doesn't support animations. but unlike gif it can handle multi-level transparency, useful for shadows, which look very nice on the web. There is a file type mng for animation but it is not widely supported.