This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It's great that Papua New Guinea is still receiving updates /s
Would this be the Gif killer? If PNG can contain a relatively similar frame count & time limit but with marginally better image quality it just may.
But is it backwards compatible with an old version that can't be updated?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
That was because they added 'shorts' and friend-lists to it.
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.
Yep, it was one of the ways to have an animated avatar on BB forums.
Most recently, I have seen them being used in animated chat stickers (like on Signal).
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.
Goodbye gif hello png?
gif almost got replaced by mp4 anyway during the early imgur era
Fracturing support for a legacy format makes so much more sense than actually supporting a modern format like JXL, right?
If this actually stands a chance of taking off, I'll honestly take what I can get to normalise HDR images
HDR capable PNGs that don't look shite on SDR displays? Sign me up!
Jxl train choo choo
