3 ms·

It's rare that I see such a fractally wrong comment. I guess APNG did come from Mozilla, which I think is the only true subpart of the above?

by juped 1y ago

lifthrasiir 1y ago
Okay, I admit the "badly designed" part is my claim, but I'm very confident in that claim and can explain why. The original impetus that led to MNG was animated GIF. While GIF was also designed as extensible, GIF practically only had a handful number of extensions and wasn't that complex. MNG in comparison was essentially a binary version of SVG as I have described, except that it had no vector graphics and can more accurately be described as a binary slideshow format [1]. No one asked for this! The PNG development group forgot its goal and made a much bloated specification. As a result libmng, while working, was a quite big library to be incorporated into Gecko and ultimately rejected in favor of APNG which only required a small patch to libpng. It is amusing that the original PNG specification had chunks corresponding to GIF extensions including animation one; those chunks might have been widespread in the alternate universe! If the group's goal was indeed a slideshow format, it should have been two separate formats, one for multi-part images and one for animations and object transformations. The former is necessary because one aspect of GIF was that a difference from the previous frame can be encoded, so this "Delta-PNG" format should have been made into the mainline PNG specification as an option. (These additional images could have been used as previews, for example.) And anything else should be a simple textual format that refers to external files. MNG instead had chunks for JPEG images---came with its standalone sister format called JNG---, which is absurd when you think about it---why should there be JNG when JFIF and Exif already exist? The modern SVG happens to be perfectly usable as this second format, and it is fine being textual. [1] If you can't believe what I've said, see the table of contents of the actual specification: http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/spec/ http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/spec/
- jmmcd 1y ago
  Link [1] doesn't seem to mention svg or vector graphics at all.
  - magicalhippo 1y ago
    I think the point was that like SVG, MNG has the ability to transform existing objects in order to compose an image. See this example[1] for illustration. [1]: http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/spec/#example4 http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/spec/#example4
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    > Link [1] doesn't seem to mention svg or vector graphics at all. They specifically called out that it doesn't support vector graphics, so the latter shouldn't be a surprise. And if you want to check if it's like SVG but worse, you need to compare that spec with the SVG spec, not look for the word SVG.

It's rare that I see such a fractally wrong comment. I guess APNG did come from Mozilla, which I think is the only true subpart of the above?

by juped 1y ago

It's rare that I see such a fractally wrong comment. I guess APNG did come from Mozilla, which I think is the only true subpart of the above?

lifthrasiir 1y ago

Okay, I admit the "badly designed" part is my claim, but I'm very confident in that claim and can explain why. The original impetus that led to MNG was animated GIF. While GIF was also designed as extensible, GIF practically only had a handful number of extensions and wasn't that complex. MNG in comparison was essentially a binary version of SVG as I have described, except that it had no vector graphics and can more accurately be described as a binary slideshow format [1]. No one asked for this! The PNG development group forgot its goal and made a much bloated specification. As a result libmng, while working, was a quite big library to be incorporated into Gecko and ultimately rejected in favor of APNG which only required a small patch to libpng. It is amusing that the original PNG specification had chunks corresponding to GIF extensions including animation one; those chunks might have been widespread in the alternate universe! If the group's goal was indeed a slideshow format, it should have been two separate formats, one for multi-part images and one for animations and object transformations. The former is necessary because one aspect of GIF was that a difference from the previous frame can be encoded, so this "Delta-PNG" format should have been made into the mainline PNG specification as an option. (These additional images could have been used as previews, for example.) And anything else should be a simple textual format that refers to external files. MNG instead had chunks for JPEG images---came with its standalone sister format called JNG---, which is absurd when you think about it---why should there be JNG when JFIF and Exif already exist? The modern SVG happens to be perfectly usable as this second format, and it is fine being textual. [1] If you can't believe what I've said, see the table of contents of the actual specification: http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/spec/ http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/spec/

jmmcd 1y ago
Link [1] doesn't seem to mention svg or vector graphics at all.
- magicalhippo 1y ago
  I think the point was that like SVG, MNG has the ability to transform existing objects in order to compose an image. See this example[1] for illustration. [1]: http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/spec/#example4 http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/spec/#example4
- Dylan16807 1y ago
  > Link [1] doesn't seem to mention svg or vector graphics at all. They specifically called out that it doesn't support vector graphics, so the latter shouldn't be a surprise. And if you want to check if it's like SVG but worse, you need to compare that spec with the SVG spec, not look for the word SVG.