advantages between png, jpg and gif

[chadypu]

well i know alot about jpg and gif, i use them more than png

but is there a plus side to pngs? i know they have much smaller file sizes (usually), is the image quality still there?

yeah i just wanna know if i should "convert" to png or something

especially if i work on gd more in the future

[JustKIDn]

The .png format was created in response to the licensing requirements put on the .gif format.

It has been worked on for a number of years now and should be pretty good.

As I recall, it's suppose to have all the best attributes from .jpg and .gif.
Including layers and animation.

[PeOfEo]

I would use Gif because it is 256 color and you can use websafe w/ it. Png is good, but not for corners and borders if you are mixing it w/ html or css borders, the colors just do not match cross platform.

[ray326]

gif - max 256 colors, no loss, good for drawing-like images, animation, transparency

jpeg - full color, lossy compression, good for photo-like images, no animation, no transparency

png - full color, lossless compression, good all around, MUCH larger files from photo-like images than jpeg due to lossless compression, no animation, alpha channel transparency

[JustKIDn]

Here is a good info page on the .png format;

png's web site! (http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngintro.html)

ray,
You're right, png doesn't support animated graphics. It must of been in it's early specs and then got dropped.

HTH

[PeOfEo]

well can png do websafe? I have not had great success w/ that. I open psp, set the site colors to a websafe (from the chart in my sig, it has a list) and set the color in php and walah they did not match :(

[ray326]

There is a spec for PNG animation called MNG but I've never seen any significant software support for either the creation or the viewing of it. It took a LONG time for the major browsers to support PNG and of course now the reason for PNG's creation (the Unisys LZW patent) no longer exists. (This is a particular interest to me because I was one of the original developers that worked with CIS to get GIF off the ground.)

PNG is full color so it can do web-safe but the apps generating PNG output have to support it to make it happen.

[PeOfEo]

Darn... I will stick w/ the gif for my borders and corners for now then.

[metallibanger]

What is up with you people and your sick obsession with being web safe and standards aprooved?!? So now it's immoral to use jpg photos because they can't be viewed by anyone who hasn't moved out of the stone age, or doesn't have anything more than a 5 dollar video card? Well, hell, why don't you just outlaw the use of pictures of any kind all together, because that's just mean for people on text based browsers!

For god's sake, use what you WANT, not what standards have approved, just be conscious of the accessiblity, and if it's acceptable to you, who care what anyone else thinks? Anyone who uses gifs exclusively for accessibility reasons, I fully expect to never use flash, animated gifs (you gotta think of those still using 14.4 modems y'know), javascripting, tables, or over 5k of coding of any kind.

Andy Oliphant
A&M Design Studios

[Paul Jr]

Originally posted by metallibanger
hell, why don't you just outlaw the use of pictures of any kind all together, because that's just mean for people on text based browsers!
That's why you try not to convey important information through images, and place images as backgrounds whenever possible, and make sure you always use the alt attribute (http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/altAttribute). ;)

[PeOfEo]

Originally posted by metallibanger
What is up with you people and your sick obsession with being web safe and standards aprooved?!? So now it's immoral to use jpg photos because they can't be viewed by anyone who hasn't moved out of the stone age, or doesn't have anything more than a 5 dollar video card? Well, hell, why don't you just outlaw the use of pictures of any kind all together, because that's just mean for people on text based browsers!

For god's sake, use what you WANT, not what standards have approved, just be conscious of the accessiblity, and if it's acceptable to you, who care what anyone else thinks? Anyone who uses gifs exclusively for accessibility reasons, I fully expect to never use flash, animated gifs (you gotta think of those still using 14.4 modems y'know), javascripting, tables, or over 5k of coding of any kind.

Andy Oliphant
A&M Design Studios I use websafe because if it is not websafe all browsers are going to display it wrong, when you use images for border and code borders and the colors do not match it just looks like crap. Websafe = matches the colors in you html. I do not use jpeg because they generally just look like crap with those nasty little artifacts, I can get rid of those with psp but still... yea... never mind. I JUST DONT USE EM!