Chris Tyler wrote:
> APNG was created to fill a void -- there was a need for a modern
> animated format with two qualities: it needed to be lightweight and
> backward-compatible (degrade gracefully). After nearly a year of
> discussion and consultation, the PNG group decided not to back it;
Because they already have a perfectly fine format, MNG, which Mozilla
decided to drop support for. And in fact the main reason graceful
degradation is needed at all is browsers not supporting the format. What do
you suggest next? That all images need to "gracefully degrade" in a browser
which only supports GIF, such as the original Mosaic? The fact that support
for animations is being hacked into a format designed for still images is
one of the complaints the PNG group had about APNG.
> Mozilla gave it further thought and decided they needed it. It has since
> been implemented by other browsers (such as Opera) and used in other
> applications (such as WorldDMB, see ESTI TS 101 499 V2.2.1).
That's 2 of the major browsers. Come back when you get M$, Google, Apple
etc. to support it. Even MNG had wider support before Mozilla dropped it,
e.g. Konqueror in KDE 3 supported it just fine. (Sadly, in KDE 4, support
for animations in Konqueror regressed and MNG was one of the victims of it.
Other problems include: "stop animations" initially didn't work, I fixed
that; animated GIFs don't animate when resized, at least last I checked. But
that's not a Mozilla issue.)
> The alternative, MNG, is a heavy spec that offers no graceful
> degradation for older browsers. It's been around for years, but is
> almost never used. If it was a lighter spec, surely we'd be using it for
> animated cursors and throbbers by now.
The main reason it's almost never used is lack of browser support. Mozilla
dropping their existing support for it definitely did not help!
Kevin Kofler
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