GIF support
Andres Petralli
apetralli at icu.unizh.ch
Sat Jun 26 15:38:32 UTC 2004
Hi Russel,
On 26.06.2004, at 13:24, Russell Coker wrote:
> On Sat, 26 Jun 2004 19:30, Andres Petralli <apetralli at icu.unizh.ch>
> 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
More information about the fedora-devel-list
mailing list