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APNG is a funny, political beast. It basically evolved after Mozilla decided to nuke MNG support to make Firefox slimmer and then needed to re-invent a transpar

APNG is a funny, political beast. It basically evolved after Mozilla decided to nuke MNG support to make Firefox slimmer and then needed to re-invent a transparency-capable animation format for browser "throbbers". There were calls to replace libpng with libmng which purported to support both PNG and MNG at the same binary size, but those never panned out. IIRC, individuals in the PNG group took the whole thing as a slight and then refused to incorporate it into the official spec, leaving it as a bit of an orphan. The Chrome guys never bothered implementing it and quietly worked on WebP. I suspect that part of the reason APNG never received widespread adoption was bad blood from MNG never getting proper attention. While MNG was kind of a crappy spec in retrospect, it was still way better than an animated GIF. Unfortunately JNG was also a casualty in this whole war -- a format that could have been both lossless and supported proper alpha transparency. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195280 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195280 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18574 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18574

gpvos 12y ago
As far as I remember, the main difference in point of view was that the PNG guys (rightly so, IMO) saw animations as something different from a still image, and wanted to keep that distinction, also in the face of MIME types, file headers, file name extensions, etc., while lots of other (misguided) people wanted animation as a feature in an image format, because they were used to that from GIF. There may have been some bad blood from MNG, but that was not the main point as far as I understand. Although I must say that the links you provide are interesting reading.
- mmastrac 12y ago
  Here's the vote where the PNG group rejected APNG: https://web.archive.org/web/20080203042347/http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=3.0.6.32.20070420132821.012dd8e8%40mail.comcast.net https://web.archive.org/web/20080203042347/http://sourceforg... And Vlad's message after the vote: http://osdir.com/ml/graphics.png.general/2007-04/msg00286.html http://osdir.com/ml/graphics.png.general/2007-04/msg00286.ht...
  - maxst 12y ago
    APNG support in WebKit is implemented as a thin layer on top on regular vanilla libpng. So all that stuff is not very relevant.
    - mmastrac 12y ago
      From a technical point of view it's all irrelevant, but I find APNG to be very interesting from a historical point of view. It's both a technical and a political compromise, and all things considered, not a bad standard.

gpvos 12y ago

As far as I remember, the main difference in point of view was that the PNG guys (rightly so, IMO) saw animations as something different from a still image, and wanted to keep that distinction, also in the face of MIME types, file headers, file name extensions, etc., while lots of other (misguided) people wanted animation as a feature in an image format, because they were used to that from GIF. There may have been some bad blood from MNG, but that was not the main point as far as I understand. Although I must say that the links you provide are interesting reading.

mmastrac 12y ago
Here's the vote where the PNG group rejected APNG: https://web.archive.org/web/20080203042347/http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_name=3.0.6.32.20070420132821.012dd8e8%40mail.comcast.net https://web.archive.org/web/20080203042347/http://sourceforg... And Vlad's message after the vote: http://osdir.com/ml/graphics.png.general/2007-04/msg00286.html http://osdir.com/ml/graphics.png.general/2007-04/msg00286.ht...
- maxst 12y ago
  APNG support in WebKit is implemented as a thin layer on top on regular vanilla libpng. So all that stuff is not very relevant.
  - mmastrac 12y ago
    From a technical point of view it's all irrelevant, but I find APNG to be very interesting from a historical point of view. It's both a technical and a political compromise, and all things considered, not a bad standard.