On Fri, Mar 30, 2001 at 08:56:12AM -0500, Mark H. Wood wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Mar 2001, Joris Lambrecht wrote:
> > i'd advise you to use .jpg or any other format wich will get
> > you similar results in size AND quality
>
> JPEG is great stuff for continuous-tone images (photographs and
> the like) but if you use it with line art (which is what GIF is
> best for) you get ugly smudges around the edges of things. PNG
> was designed to be the better, patent-free successor to GIF.
my understanding:
GIF is for color-index images, where there are not-so-many
distinct colors, as in a corporate logo, or line art.
with gif, you can select a small color table and your image
requires less storage (and transmission time). for photos,
you sacrifice a great deal of quality using gif.
for short: gif is for reduced-bit color graphics.
JPEG is for continuous-tone images, where shades and tints
change gradually, as in a photograph of the sky (fading from
deep blue to light blue) or people (flesh tones darken in the
shadows) or fuzzy drop shadows. jpeg has a compression
algorithm allowing you to choose between better compression
and better image quality: the smaller the compressed results,
the 'crunchier' the resulting image is -- you lose some info
(not much but it gets visible at the extreme high-compression
end of the scale) so it's called "lossy" compression.
for short: jpeg is for 24-bit imagery.
PNG was born within the week after the greedmongers at unisys
started charging for gif. it has capabilities of using
reduced color tables like gif, and it also has the ability to
go full-boar on 24-bit r/g/b photographs as well. it offers
various transparency and compression options that not all
browsers support -- but there's more support today than
there was yesterday, and there'll be more tomorrow than
there is today.
for short: if you can't do it in png, quit. :)
there's a related format, MNG, based on PNG that handles
animations. same situation on support -- there'll be more next
week than there is today.
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