Hi Russel,
On 26.06.2004, at 13:24, Russell Coker wrote:
On Sat, 26 Jun 2004 19:30, Andres Petralli <apetralli@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
GIF PNG JPG 57.3% 8.7% 34.1% 69.9% 1.4% 28.7%
I'm sorry, but the numbers are completly irrelevant. The sampling is way too small to give a representative view of the general usage on the web. Mind that your squid proxy might serve people who are more tech savy than the people who use the web on a proxy like one of i.e. Aol and that those people visit more tech savy sites than others.
Not that it means much. Often people will just use the easiest format to get
the job done, I inspected some of the .gif entries in my Squid logs and
determined that some of them have not changes for years (some appeared to be
over 5 years old). So I think that a large cause of the use of gifs on the
web is the fact that they were created (or created with tools which were
written) before the patent issue came about.
No, the point most web developers still choose gif over png is that they want compatibility with most browsers and handheld web devices. It's a fact that png is not or only partially (i.e. no alpha on IE) supported by certain browser, most relevantly by MSIE. It's also a fact that many web browsers on handheld devices or mobile phones only support jpeg, wbmp and maybe gif, but certainly not png. You can still tell those developers IE or any other browser is to blame, but they will not care because they have to deliver an impecable site to their customers without flaws on the most common web browser (95%+ IE on a non OSS related site). That's the main reason to choose gif over png.
ImageMagick makes sense, it's good for tools like that to have as many options
as possible.
That's a must for ImageMagick to put it clear. For the netpbm package it would be too.
But for PHP I can't see the point. What would adding GIF creation support
give to a PHP user? When you use PHP you want to create a web page, does it
matter to you whether the web page is comprised of .gif or .png files?
PHP uses picture generation routines with support from the GD library. These routines are very popular in WCMS (web content management systems) for which php is a strong framework. For the reasons I have explained above I think it's crucial that PHP, while being a scripting language for the web and thus used in many CMS tools for dynamic picture creation of navigational elements and others, includes gif support. Actually, it's not php which needs to include it, it's the GD library used by php which needs it (and also had before version 1.4).
Sorry, but I think you are misguided by your technical view of the things. I agree that png would be supperior, but it's still the user (the web developer here) who dictates what he needs. I'm sure that there would be a huge demand for gif support especially in PHP applications! Also, I really don't want to argue with you wheter to use png or gif, my original question simply was, wheter those libraries for gif will be re-included into future packages.
Greets,
Andres
