It looks like our very own Stuart Parmenter (aka Pavlov) and Vlad have developed an extension to PNG that gives us a mechanism to build animated PNGs (APNG).
Having full 8-bit alpha transparent animations based on the standard PNG format is going to be a real boon to website and Firefox theme development. I can't wait.
Posted by asa at August 27, 2004 06:13 PM> APNG is backwards-compatible with PNG; any PNG decoder is able to decode the first frame of an APNG and treat it as a normal single-frame PNG.
I assume this means that folks can serve APNG to IE and have it render as something reasonable -- awesome!
Posted by: Darin Fisher on August 27, 2004 07:09 PMSo what does MNG do then? My understanding was that MNG is the animated version of PNG.
Posted by: Luke Shingles on August 27, 2004 07:28 PMMeanwhile, we have working MNG code just waiting to get checked in...
Posted by: LinkTiger on August 27, 2004 07:35 PMAPNG might be a perfectly good format. The spec looks to be simple and easy to implement. But there are questions to be answered:
Where's the discussion of this new format with the PNG and MNG groups? (Or has Pavlov been banned from their company? :)
How much review has the spec had if two guys (even Parmenter and Vukicevic) developed it in private "Over the last week or so"?
Most importantly, how relevant is APNG, particularly with the prevalence of animated GIFs, the state of PNG support in that browser, and the history of MNG? There's a single APNG image on the web, and probably on the order of tens (maximum) on Pavlov and Vlad's hard drives.
APNG might be the best thing to hit the web since... well, since PNG. It might not. Until it's recognized outside of Mozilla, it's nothing more than Yet Another Image Format.
Posted by: Peter J. on August 27, 2004 07:38 PMIt is meaningless unless there is tool for generating APNG from PNGs... Any PNG2APNG convertor? Even DOS-mode is ok...
It would be better if there are plugins for existing image editors, e.g. plugin for ImageReady (a companion of Photoshop).
There is a link to the source for a tool to make APNGs at the bottom of the APNG spec page...
http://www.vlad1.com/~vladimir/projects/apng/
> Most importantly, how relevant is APNG, [...]
It lets us finally scratch the last reason to use GIFS within the UI
One thing about supporting this APNG and not MNG is APNG is not standardized. Remember the browser wars? Where IE and Netscape both made up their own tags, and designers had to create two copies of their websites. This is pretty much going there again IMO - if IE decides to support MNG, either we're all still using animated GIFs, or we'll have to create an animation for IE and another one for Mozilla.
Posted by: Cow on August 28, 2004 03:20 AMMNG is not a good format. It is complex and bloated. None of its many profiles correspond to useful animated PNGs. For example, check out the spec for the MAGN chunk:
http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/spec/#mng-MAGN
This is really complex. For example, it requires you to implement scaling with linear interpolation in your image decoder! And note that this is regarded as a "simple" MNG feature. The only MNG profile that does not require MAGN support is MNG-VLC, but MNG-VLC doesn't support basic features that animated GIFs have had for ages, such as variable frame rate.
Actually we're not the only ones to think this. The KDE/Qt people came to the same conclusion and also did their own format. Check this out:
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/library/kdeqt/kde3arch/imaging.html
> QMovie doesn't yet support the MNG format, that is the animated "variant" of
> PNG. However, Troll Tech has implemented a very nice and far superiour add-on
> to PNG as an replacement, which is unfortunately not yet standardized.
> However, they're working on adding it to the PNG standard and we all hope that
> they will succeed.
I hope that we can work with Troll Tech to arrive at a common format and propose it for standardization.
It's sad. We needed a good animated PNG format years ago and the fact that MNG exists has blocked us from making progress.
Posted by: Robert O'Callahan on August 28, 2004 05:54 AMCow, get real!
IE will *never* support MNG. Only if it had, seven+ years ago, might it make sense to put MNG in default builds of Mozilla products. MNG is not used enough (at most hundreds of instances, according to google.com) on the web to matter. And as roc points out, it misses the "just animaged PNGs, please" target by miles, falling into the early-mid-90's "do too much under multiple mandatory non-minimal profiles" design trap.
APNG is for use in XUL UIs, it's not going to restart a browser tag-war. Saying that just sounds silly the first time out -- it's like crying werewolf instead of wolf ;-).
/be
Posted by: Brendan Eich on August 28, 2004 10:04 AMHi,
@Robert O'Callahan
QT have libmng support since late 2000 with libmng and Konquerer is using it.
@Brandan Eich
Nice that IE won't support MNG ... but will they support APNG? Why they should? Does MS ever supported PNG fully? So why they should support APNG? And APNG isn't used enough, so it shouldn't go into mozilla.
So you only want to move the Browser Tag war to an image/animation war.
Posted by: Alexander Opitz on August 31, 2004 09:09 AM@Alexandar,
who cares if IE would not support APNG - isnt the whole premise that it would display one complete frame to a decoder that supports PNG and not APNG..
@vfwlkr
So MS can say ... hey, it's enough to view the first image why I should do more?
Ans the user says ... hey, the guys on this website are to stupid to animate a image, I only see a still image.
How can the user recognize that there is more then that? How he will recognize that his browser is a bit of rubbish.
Posted by: Alexander Opitz on August 31, 2004 04:21 PMAlexander, I think one of the motivation behind APNG is the possibility to use it for XUL interface (for Mozilla as an application platform - not only a web browser)- alpha transparency is amazing, but with animated image, I think we can not imagine how good it will be :-)
And then, well APNG may be a success on the web, maybe not, but that is another story !
It is sad that MNG did not get the recognition it deserved, but it was clearly 'over-engineered' and APNG, as simple and light version, may just be the tool that will bring animated PNG to the web - for the rest people will go for Flash or SVG, well did I say something wrong? :-)
@franCk
> It is sad that MNG did not get the recognition it deserved
Yeah, MNG was removed from Mozilla at a point where the web stared to recognice MNG.
Posted by: Alexander Opitz on September 1, 2004 12:37 AMDunno if anyone here is in a position to do something about it, but the real killer app that might jumpstart APNG adoption would be an auto-convert utility for animated GIFs, like this simple frontend for GIF2PNG:
http://www.r1ch.net/stuff/gif2png/webinterface/
If it were this easy, you could pass that link around and get people to start switching.
Posted by: JP on September 1, 2004 08:16 PMStuart wrote,
> There is a link to the source for a tool to make APNGs at the bottom of the APNG spec page...
> http://www.vlad1.com/~vladimir/projects/apng/
Which link? I see three links there and none of them seems to point to source code for such a tool.
Thanks,
Lars
Alexander wrote,
> So MS can say ... hey, it's enough to view the first image why I should do more?
> And the user says ... hey, the guys on this website are to stupid to animate a image, I only see a still image.
> How can the user recognize that there is more then that? How he will recognize that his browser is a bit of rubbish.
Here's an idea... put something in the APNG standard to allow the file creator to specify that the first image is not part of the real animation.
That way, you could put in a first frame that displays a message "Your browser doesn't support APNG". This would display in any browser that's not up to snuff, but in a browser that understood APNG, you'd only get the remaining frames.
That may be a dumb idea. Just brainstorming.