Bell tolling for PNG graphics format? (News.com) [LWN.net]

News.com predicts the future of the png image format as the gif format's LZW compression patent expires. "A patent underlying one of the Web's most popular graphics formats is set to expire later this month, raising the question of whether a rival, open format, created as a royalty-free alternative, will become obsolete."

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Bell tolling for PNG graphics format? (News.com)

Posted Jun 17, 2003 10:18 UTC (Tue) by mly (guest, #2171) [Link]

That was a silly article! Will anyone go back to using the bad old compress instead of gzip or bz2 just because compress won't be burdened by a patent?

For those who has had the poor taste to put animated images on their web sites, gif has been the choice all along. But when it comes to pictures that have the decency to stand still while you look at them, png gives us more bang for the byte.

I don't see why anyone would like to revert to bigger files and images of lower quality.