Adon Metcalfe wrote:
why don't we have a conversion tool that converts
all the uploaded
gif's to mng?. mng is the animated version of png, and it should be
supported in browsers soon, the mozilla/firefox extension is here:
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/mngsupport.
Simple answer: why bother?
GIF: supported by all graphical browsers made within the last 15 years; no patent issues
after 7
July this year; wide variety of creation tools available
MNG: native support in Konqueror, plugins available for other browsers, removed from
Mozilla due to
size & politics; advantages include different compression levels, colour depths, forms
of animation
(last time I looked MNG even included interaction, like a cross between an imagemap and a
Flash
movie!) - NONE of which could be spontaneously created by a conversion tool.
I think outruling gif's is harsh, unless we
provide them with tools to
convert what they have into something more usable, i.e. on the image
page have a pointer to tools that conver gif's to mng or a series of
png's.
I think outruling GIFs is probably unnecessary if there are genuinely no patent issues.
However, a further point to consider is whether we *want* animated images anyway (as
Fennec says,
the only advantage of GIFs). As soon as you print out the article, for instance, such an
image is
likely to become less than useless. That's not to say that there are no cases where
animation is
useful, but I personally "de-animated" an image, because the movement was more
annoying than it was
useful - I just replaced growing lines with arrows; it's now
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Fresnel.png if you're curious.
So, in the majority of cases, it's best to encourage people to save straight to PNG (I
don't think
conversion will very often be an issue, since the majority of tools that can create GIFs
can
probably create PNGs by now). If people really can't, we should let them just upload
GIFs, I guess.
--
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]