Megan — Mon, 07 Jan 2002 17:07:56 +0000

PNG is supported by all v. 6 browsers as well as Mozilla. However, IE 6 does not support the alpha transparency feature (Opera 6 and Mozilla/NS 6 do) and probably other features mairving listed. So, until IE catches up (and the v. 5 and lower browsers are pushed out of the market) we won't be able to use these special features.

mairving — Mon, 07 Jan 2002 16:37:36 +0000

Here is some info on .png:

It is not supported at all by any browser prior to 4.0. Images in PNG are quite nice. PHP can also be made to do PNG images. The big deal with gif's now is that Unisys has the patent on gif's and they one day may enforce that patent. A PNG file has:

8-bit pallete support
Lossless compression scheme and better compression than gif.
Two-dimensional progressive display that is more sophisticated than gif's.
An alpha channel that can contain 8-bit or 16-bit transparency info.
Gamma correction information to make PNG's display with it's intended brightness regardless of platform.
Several methods of checking file integrity and corruption.
Text storage capabilities, for keyword info such as copyright.
Non-patented compression free from licensing restrictions.

Great capabilities, still lacking in compatibility. I have only seen it used on a handful of sites. It's funny though that one of those sites is Mandrake, one of the major Linux distros.