Exif marks the spot as fresh version of PNG image standard arrives The free graphics format that people actually know how to pronounce has been updated. The World Wide Web consortium has announced the third edition of the specification for the Portable Network Graphics format – or PNG, pronounced "ping", for short. The chair of the W3C working group in charge of PNG, Chris Blume, has a …
That depends on context and whether graphics files are masculine or feminine, but in different situations it would be bng, phng or mhng, although the last of those would usually be in the context of it belonging to the speaker so it would be framed more like "ymh mhng i" which isn't far off at all.
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Multiple-image Network Graphics (MNG) is a graphics file format published in 2001 for animated images. Its specification is publicly documented and there are free software reference implementations available.
Multiple-image Network Graphics (MNG) format (Wikipedia)
MNG is closely related to the PNG image format.
I've been using it for years. Sometimes as part of a PDF resize/image depth/crop workflow: PDF -> The GIMP as Layers -> export MNG -> convert to PDF.
So is this a revision of PNG or MNG?
Ah, thanks for reminding me of Multiview (and associated Proustian recollections of Lemmings, Alien Breed, OctaMED, TBClock, and so on...)
In a related rant, it's always irked me that if I drag a file into a Windows file dialog, the OS copies that file to the location shown by the dialog.
Whereas on the Amiga, dragging a file into a file dialog would set the value of the dialog to the directory & name of that file.
Which to my mind - maybe I'm weird? - seems more logical.
Mac file dialogs work that way too (like Amiga).
Back to off-topic, Datatypes are great aren't they? Just drag the new PNG datatype into a system directory and all Datatype aware image software will recognise the new format.
But that's an old OS and now we have modern OSes which are much better... oh.
It was developed almost exclusively once Unisys started to assert its rights over GIF and demand licence fees for creating the files. It went beyond GIFs 8-bit colour limit, but the main improvement was a proper alpha channel. For anyone involved in websites there was a brief scuffle over whether to stick with GIF or switch to PNG, but fortunately the surprisingly quick browser format for the new format meant that it was all over in a year or two.
Right, but for these weren't relevant for most websites and thus content production chains. Things could have become a lot more expensive if they hadn't been a more or less concerted move from GIF to PNG. There were themselves increasingly replaced by full-blown video, but made a come back in the meme-obsessed social media. But by the all patents had expired, though many of the copyrights hadn't.
A bit of a stretch to say "22 years on from the last spec, you can now animate your PNGs".
Animated images were part of the original design, but animation just wasn't felt to be very important so MNG didn't get the love. (Presumably internet users were more focussed on actual content back then rather than shiny things.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-image_Network_Graphics
I do like that the image that goes with this article on the Latest News page subtly references the "Lenna" image that started it all.
As it's now moved out of the latest and therefore doesn't show the image...
it's referenced in the "og:image" meta tag.
PNG is often more suitable for non-photographic bitmaps. Compression by colour reduction makes them great for sprites.
As for the newer formats: they're still struggling to establish themselves because of the need for backward compatiblity. I pushed for WebP when it became generally available because it made much smaller files than JPEG at a time when browsers didn't use many parallel connections and bandwidth was scarcer. However, as at the time neither Internet Explorer nor Safari supported it, JPEGs also had to be offered. So, you either had to do more work to cover all bases, or stick with what was bound to work. Even now CMS support for anything other than JPEG, which has seen some improvements, is nothing like as good as it should be.
> Is PNG still relevant or is it largely supplanted by WEBP...
For a start, if you'd like to be certain that your image has been losslessly compressed, PNG gives you that assurance, just by being a PNG. Good luck finding out if that WEBP image you are about to right-click-save will be written out lossless, lossy, a bit of both in the one file.
(Although too many users don't give a damn anyway, so, yeah, guess only a few of us are interested in knowing that. Heck, I lost the fight over whether an entire company's procedure flowcharts should be written out in PNG - yes, yes they should - because the chap in charge didn't seem to mind text and line drawings saved as JPEGs - all blurry from the ringing - and changing his default format or choosing to "save as..." was too much trouble. Needn't have been PNG, really, one-bit RLE would have done the job better. Maybe he should've been prescribed glasses, like all his colleagues who were trying to figure out why his presentations never appeared to be in focus; cue much specs cleaning.)
Sorry Liam, I’ve been using PNG since at least ~2002, when I bought Macromedia Fireworks which uses PNG as its native format, and it has never once occurred to me to pronounce it “ping”!
Incidentally Fireworks was much better at creating and manipulating complex text than the contemporaneous Adobe Photoshop (?4) so I decided to use it for my advertising graphics. Guess which app Adobe chose to can when they bought Macomedia... all they were interested in was Flash. I was so annoyed, I wanted the bugs in Fireworks fixed!
No, MNG is something different entirely: as you'd see if you took the trouble to check Wikipedia before posting.
The problem appears to be that MNG is "all singing, all dancing" with relatively large files and a complex decoder as a result. APNG is generally simpler, and has the advantage that a decoder that doesn't understand it as a PNG extension will still display the first frame.
In any event, the belated endorsement of APNG has to be applauded since it will hopefully avoid further duplication of effort.
Excuse me? Is there porn on the internet? I never realised... This must be stopped at once!
ai Ph'Nu'Gh mglw'nfah Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
Cower mortals! For I have summoned Mary Whitehouse from the crypt where she lies, dead but dreaming! She will cleanse the internet with unholy fire!
Think of the children! No! Not in that way, you dirty beast!
It remains to be seen whether this PNG update makes any kind of difference at all.
I doubt it.
GIF is still the goto for bitmap animation and probably always will be.
Who would’ve thought that in 2025 it was not only alive and kicking but bigger than ever before?
Webp is the choice for everything else if you can stomach that it’s a google release.
It does animation too, not that I can recall seeing it used in practice.
I reckon PNG will be pretty much dead in a few years.
GIF however will live on.
If you frequent meme pages/boards and/or "gif hosts", most "gifs" nowadays are actually .webp or straight up MPEG-4 video ("DivX")/x.264 with no audio track. Said pages will still serve .gif files if coaxed, but will prefer nearly anything else first.
APNG has pretty much been killed dead by Chromium refusing to implement the standard. I doubt there will be a resurgence, but I hope I'm wrong as back in the day it was much smoother than .gif.
Nobody likes or wants to use WEBP and AVIF and they're not very good at lossy or lossless compression, respectively. JPEG XL seems to be the "ultimate" format which performs best in most scenarios and has all the features anyone might ever need, including lossless compression of existing JPEGs. But Google wants it dead and so we can't have nice things.
So it looks like we'll have PNG and JPEG around for another 50 years.
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