This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
They should have let it die because nearly everything else is nowadays somehow better:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNG#Comparison_with_other_file_formats
2029 Headline: Worlds largest data breach caused by zero day exploit in popular PNG 3.0 renderer
the payload was reportedly embedded in an animated image of the attacker repeatedly flicking his left testicle
Ouch
I bet it was a single flick and he ran it on a loop.
Animated PNG has been trying to be an extension to the PNG spec for 20+ years.
Right there's actually like a select few applications that support it which is cool, but so many get confused when they see an apng file with frames.
But is it backwards compatible with an old version that can't be updated?
Speaking for animation, your browser probably already supports APNG. APNG is 21 years old and has decent adoption. But it’s officially part of the club.
That said, APNGs are fat as fuck and they’re a pretty old solution to animated graphics with an alpha channel. Don’t expect to see everyone making APNGs all of the sudden. There is a reason why people have kept it at a distance.
Yeah, this was my first thought. How many slightly older, no-longer-being-updated pieces of software will fail to open the new version? Hopefully it’s built in a way that it just falls back to legacy and ignores the extra information so you can at least load the file.
Popular photo and video editing apps like Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, and Avid Media Composer already support it, alongside Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Apple’s iOS and macOS also work with the new file standard.
This is all the article mentions. I hope you’re right about the backwards compatibility.
I remember the Wild West Web days when it was a toss up seeing if animated Gifs, transparencies in images, or the specific hexadecimal for your personal shade of purple you created would render properly between browsers.
Lies! That gif is sped up 2000%!
LOL, I heard that gif. Timed it in my mind, on the money OP.
I mean, that's already how animated .gifs work. If somehow you manage to load one into a viewer that doesn't support the animation functionality it will at least dutifully display the first frame.
How the hell you would manage to do that in this day and age escapes me, but there were a fair few years in the early '90s where you might run into that sort of thing.
Some of this is paving the cowpath - the animated PNG stuff is 20 years old and e.g. Firefox has had support since March 2007.
The PNG format is made of chunks that have determined roles, and provides provisions for newer "standardized" chunks alongside the custom chunks it had supported until now. It is likely that PNG made with newer software that does not use new features, or uses only additional features, will remain readable by older software to some extent.
Jxl train choo choo
PNG PNG!
I could have sworn animated pngs were a thing in the Macromedia Fireworks days. Really dating myself with that ref.
There were two different animated PNG extensions, MNG and APNG. Neither of them ever really caught on. I guess they're hoping to do better by baking it into the core spec.
APNG is what they're using in v3, so all many libraries need to do* is update that code for HDR.
* surely that's easy, right?
I mean, on a Linux system that's not riddled with flatpak / snap / ... You'd basically only need to update libpng and you'd be good.
Yes. But if you live in the future, you have to wait for dozens of dozens of intermediate to do so! Great!
Now if anyone don't mind explaining, PNG vs JXL?
JXL is badly supported but it does offer lossless encoding in a more flexible and much more efficient way than png does
Basically jxl could theoretically replace png, jpg, and also exr.
Interestingly, I downloaded GNOME's pride month wallpaper to see what it looked like, and the files were JXL. Never seen them in the wild before that
Some parts of the open source world probably still desperately try to make JXL happen. This is understandable, considering its potential. Shame this wouldn't work.
Why are they trying to make it happen, and why it no work? Is JXL better than PNG? Maybe I need to do some research to better learn the difference
Fracturing support for a legacy format makes so much more sense than actually supporting a modern format like JXL, right?
