Originally posted by Wertigon
[b]Who cares? GIF is ancient and PNG owns GIF any day. The only thing PNG can’t handle are animations AFAIK. Everything else PNG got full support for, and most important of all BETTER support than GIFs. GIF only got binary transparency, has suckier compression rates and can only support 256 colors/GIF.
Now PNG on the other hand… Alpha transperencies, 65535 colors, same if not smaller file sizes, and things like that are all reasons why I love it.
Now if only crappy IE would start giving native support to PNG… [/b]
Wert: Perhaps technically, but GIFs are way more popular, so PNGs aren’t going to be in particularly high use anytime soon (if it catches on earlier than five years’ time, I’ll be VERY surprised, especially given this news). It may never catch on at all. Remember Betamax? It was also far higher quality than VHS. It just never caught on.
Originally posted by Cidolfas Wert: Perhaps technically, but GIFs are way more popular, so PNGs aren’t going to be in particularly high use anytime soon (if it catches on earlier than five years’ time, I’ll be VERY surprised, especially given this news). It may never catch on at all. Remember Betamax? It was also far higher quality than VHS. It just never caught on.
The question is, can my toaster use PNGs?
There were never any rules against having and viewing PNGs. The patent just applied to the software used to compress and decompress them - the paint programs and viewers. Popular paint programs like PSP and Photoshop paid for licenses.
PNGs are still better since they support more colors and have better compression. And PNG versus GIF is not like betamax vs VHS. PNGs and GIFs are purely software, using PNGs reduces bandwidth and storage necessary. Beta and VHS tapes are actual physical entities. Converting from one to the other is more difficult and time consuming, they are analog so the conversion will incur generational loss, and supporting both VHS and Beta would be difficult, requiring two machines probably. Supporting both PNG and GIF is easy (just include separate decoding routines) so one program should easily be able to view either format. Converting pictures from GIF to PNG is not diffucult, just use a batch conversion tool and on web pages go through and replace GIF with PNG (ok, that might be a bit time consuming).
Views just fine in IE 6. I love PNGs, but for game screenshots on 16-bit or lower consoles, GIFs do just fine. I think PNGs probably are best used as an in-between format… for example, when you’re working on photo editing, you want to be able to save your work in a lossless format. But when it comes time to publish on the web, JPEG gives you better bang for your buck (for photos anyway).
BTW, the GIMP has had GIF-editing capabilities for some time now.
i agree, but i use IE, so i gotta use .gif files…
Meh, I’ve done worse typos… 
I have to say that this is something of a GIFt to us all! 