GIF support

[Russell Coker]

On Sat, 26 Jun 2004 19:30, Andres Petralli <apetralli at icu.unizh.ch> wrote:
> > So what does GIF offer?  In the past it offered compatibility with
> > older
> > software but that shouldn't be an issue now.
>
> It is still an issue for web developers, believe me! Even though it has
> been technically surpassed by PNG, how many websites are using PNG
> instead of GIF? 1% or maybe rather 0.1%? There are not many...

I checked two Squid logs for the number of hits matching "jpg", "png", and 
"gif":

GIF   PNG  JPG
57.3% 8.7% 34.1%
69.9% 1.4% 28.7%

Of course this is only a small sampling, and it didn't catch files with 
different names, host names matching strings (I used simple grep's), etc.

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.

> > Adding it to specialised image processing tools may be good for
> > compatibility,
> > but is there a real need to add it to every program that supports
> > writinga
> > graphics file?
>
> No, not every program, but applications and libraries like GD, PHP and
> ImageMagick should be able to handle GIF. Also, as I wrote before, GIF
> support is not difficult to add. Simply dig out those removed code
> lines there have been before they were removed because of those patent
> issues.

ImageMagick makes sense, it's good for tools like that to have as many options 
as possible.

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?

-- 
http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/   My NSA Security Enhanced Linux packages
http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/  Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark
http://www.coker.com.au/postal/    Postal SMTP/POP benchmark
http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/  My home page