By ti on

According to Unisys, the owners of the patent governing GIF file format, their patent expired on June 20, 2004 everywhere except Canada. In Canada their patent expires on July 7, 2004. Less than three weeks from now.

This is important since one of the major changes in the Drupal CVS in the past three days have been changing .gif files to .pngs.

Comments

rkendall’s picture

rkendall commented

I understand some browsers (versions) have trouble with particular PNG files, and although PNG is a 'better' (or perhaps more versatile) format than GIF, I sometimes find I can produce a GIF with a smaller file size with the same quality.

So... now that the patent is expired, is there any reason _not_ to use GIFs when they seem to do the best job for a particular image?

When would someone be compelled to use a PNG over the old GIF or JPEG combination?

ti’s picture

ti commented

Use GIF. Now that the patent has expired, Unisys can't charge you money for using GIF. Unisys didn't really go after the end users of GIFs. They always targetted the software developers. Adobe, JASC, similar companies were asked to pay for their software's ability to read/write in GIF format. GD people dropped support for GIF when Unisys asked them to fork over money for reading/writing to GIF format. Old versions of GD used to read/write GIFs. I am sure next version of GD will again have support for GIF.

In a month or so there will be no compelling reason to use PNG over GIF other than a personal choice to support a open source format.

Bèr Kessels’s picture

Bèr Kessels commented

I am wondering about the truth of such a statement. You never defined the word "better".
However, png might be smaller at some points, jpeg at other, and mpeg at even other, the truth is: there is no "better"unless you define that word!

A small example: mng (the animated png) never made it into he mayor browsers, jpeg is still smaller for hires images, and flash is still better for animations. O yea, MP# is still the most used audio format on internet.

So what is the best.

Was it not ogg that is the best? it surely is, if you count audio quality as highest rating........

[Ber | webschuur.com]

Steven’s picture

Steven commented

PNG is almost always smaller than GIF except for really small images, and even then, smart palette usage usually makes the PNG smaller. Also, PNG includes more meta information, which you can remove with a utility like pngcrush.

In any case, GIF has a lot of limitations. PNG alpha transparency is only broken on IE (palette transparency works fine), and even then there's a fix for getting it to work on IE as well. This fix is applied automatically if you use the recent 'IE7' dhtml behaviour. This has the added advantage of making IE support more advanced CSS2 selectors, and also fixes some incorrect implementations of the specs.
Read all about IE7.

Oh and PNG is in no way a replacement for JPEG. The old GIF and JPEG rule has simply become PNG and JPEG.

media girl’s picture

media girl commented

I find the IE problems a big issue. Whenever I see one of my sites (which uses a PNG logo) just by happenstance on a client's or friend's machine, I have to cringe ... and start explaining. I haven't gone back to change things (yet), but nowadays I always use GIF unless there's a good size or compatibililty reason not to.

Not even the latest version of the OSX finder can preview PNG. I have no idea why, but PNG doesn't seem to be well supported around the technosphere.
--
mediagirl.org

TDobes’s picture

TDobes commented

While the Unisys patent has indeed expired, IBM apparently still holds a patent covering GIF encoding. See the footnote on Why there are no GIF files on GNU web pages.

Xtraeme’s picture

Xtraeme commented

Gifs often times are more compressed, but that's because it's imposing a strict limitation on the palette. Besides PNG is much more useful especially when it comes to alpha masks.

I challenge anyone to create a gif that produces the same effect as the one found here.

I say stick with PNG, it's an open format and better than the alternatives.