Image patents

[Linh Pham]

On 2004-04-26 12:56 +0100, Ceri Davies <ceri at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

# This is really starting to annoy me now.
# See http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040424232421417.
# 
# I'd really like to convert everything in www/en/gifs/ to a .png and
# commit the diff at http://people.freebsd.org/~ceri/gif_diff.
# 
# Cons are that we lose animated gifs (such as powerani.gif) and some
# images with transparency have lost it - see
# http://shrike.submonkey.net/~setantae/gifs/ for the old and new, but
# this is just from a pass through "{jpeg,gif}topnm | pnmtopng" so could
# possibly be solved.
# 
# Objections, comments, suggestions on how to do it better and offers to
# do it kindly accepted.

I definitely agree that the image patents are getting insane and would
welcome a shift from GIF and JPEG to PNG, though there is still a chunk
(albeit small, but who knows) of browsers that still do not support PNG
images.

For animated GIFs, the alternate would be MNG (animated PNGs):

http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/

Then again, MNG support in browsers pretty much limited to
Mozilla/Gecko-based browsers, Konquerer (and Safari?), and IE/Netscape
4.x via plug-ins.

For my website, I've already converted GIF/JPEG to PNG images and serve
them based on a very simple browser detection done in PHP. It's not the
best solution, but it works for my needs.

I took a look at your diff file and snickered at the fact that the
directory names are still "gifs/". Maybe it's a chance to re-name it to
"img/" and drop the different image formats into their own
sub-directory? Of course doing that would probably wreak havoc on CVS,
which I don't think the maintainers like :\

Anyway, that's my US$0.01.

-- 
Linh Pham                                         question at closedsrc.org
Webmaster and FreeBSD Geek                          http://closedsrc.org
Apprentice Manager Editor and Writer           http://www.daemonnews.org
C++ is to C, as lung cancer is to lung  |  There is always one more bug.
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