Eric, There is a basic problem with your logo, logo contest, and use of art in general -- a good number of us out here cannot see them! ALL of the art on your pages discusssing the logo contest come up with a red X in place of the art. You discuss the fact that you want all logo designs in PNG format, but this is a format that not all systems (Mac) and not all browsers (AOL 5.0, the only software available for older Power PC Macs) support -- so you are cutting out a sizeable portion of potential viewership. I'm a graphic designer, but I've never used, nor have I had to use, PNG format for any image. TIF, JPEG, GIF and EPS are the standards for graphics, and JPEG AND GIF are the standards for use on the web when people with non-graphic software or systems need to view them. One of the guiding principles in the development of the web has been to honor the common person, probably one using an older computer with unsophisticated software, and not freeze them out by demanding they constantly download the latest "fireworks" or whatever in order to just view a common page. Backward compatibility is an important concept, and is worth keeping whenever possible. Most of us are still using dialup 56K modems out in the world -- web entities that load up their pages with sophisticated cutting-edge animations and hi-res long-loading photos and art are virtually assured of loosing me and millions of others as potential viewers. Same thing applies with your art -- coding your artwork in PNG format closes out a lot of potential viewers -- put them JPEG and your viewership and useability will increase. Take a look a Amazon.com or any other highly successful web business -- their pages open just as pretty in my Mac as they do in the latest Pentium blazer, and they don't use advanced formats. Let's keep it low tech -- PNG is an unnecessary complication for the project. Thanks for listening. Ralph McGeehan ralphem@aol.com
Bonjour Ralph, Personnaly I use PNG files since long time and never ran into any problem. You can found part of your answer here : http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html
Aoineko
----- Original Message ----- From: Ralphem@aol.com To: wikipedia-l@wikipedia.org Sent: Friday, July 25, 2003 10:11 AM Subject: [Wikipedia-l] PNG format???
Eric, There is a basic problem with your logo, logo contest, and use of art in general -- a good number of us out here cannot see them! ALL of the art on
your
pages discusssing the logo contest come up with a red X in place of the
art. You
discuss the fact that you want all logo designs in PNG format, but this is
a
format that not all systems (Mac) and not all browsers (AOL 5.0, the only software available for older Power PC Macs) support -- so you are cutting
out a
sizeable portion of potential viewership. I'm a graphic designer, but I've
never
used, nor have I had to use, PNG format for any image. TIF, JPEG, GIF and
EPS
are the standards for graphics, and JPEG AND GIF are the standards for use
on
the web when people with non-graphic software or systems need to view
them.
One of the guiding principles in the development of the web has been to
honor
the common person, probably one using an older computer with
unsophisticated
software, and not freeze them out by demanding they constantly download
the
latest "fireworks" or whatever in order to just view a common page.
Backward
compatibility is an important concept, and is worth keeping whenever
possible. Most
of us are still using dialup 56K modems out in the world -- web entities
that
load up their pages with sophisticated cutting-edge animations and hi-res long-loading photos and art are virtually assured of loosing me and
millions of
others as potential viewers. Same thing applies with your art -- coding
your
artwork in PNG format closes out a lot of potential viewers -- put them
JPEG and
your viewership and useability will increase. Take a look a Amazon.com or
any
other highly successful web business -- their pages open just as pretty in
my
Mac as they do in the latest Pentium blazer, and they don't use advanced formats. Let's keep it low tech -- PNG is an unnecessary complication for
the
project. Thanks for listening. Ralph McGeehan ralphem@aol.com _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Ralphem-
Eric, There is a basic problem with your logo, logo contest, and use of art in general -- a good number of us out here cannot see them!
Then you can't see the current Wikipedia logo either. It is and has always been in PNG format. GIF has patent problems (the European, Japanese and Canadian patent won't expire until June 2004) and may therefore even be incompatible with the FDL's requirement of format transparency. JPEG is a lossy format. PNG is perfect for logos and screenshots. All modern browsers support it; Mozilla, a powerful, modern browsers is available for most platforms, including MacOS 9 (only version 1.21, but that's less than a year old):
http://www.mozilla.org/releases/#1.2.1
Regards,
Erik
On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 09:11:07PM -0400, Ralphem@aol.com wrote:
latest "fireworks" or whatever in order to just view a common page. Backward compatibility is an important concept, and is worth keeping whenever possible.
Please shorten your lines to 75-80, for backward-compatibility (BC). Sure BC is important, but it's 2003 and those still using hard and software from 1999 are mad in my eyes. The world's turning and the internet is even faster.
Most of us are still using dialup 56K modems out in the world -- web entities that load up their pages with sophisticated cutting-edge animations and hi-res long-loading photos and art are virtually assured of loosing me and millions of others as potential viewers. Same thing applies with your art -- coding your artwork in PNG format closes out a lot of potential viewers -- put them JPEG and your viewership and useability will increase.
Do you know why the WP is soo slow? It's not the few images but the heavy user load. I think none of the developers ever thought about putting in more images than needed.
Take a look a Amazon.com or any
other highly successful web business -- their pages open just as pretty in my Mac as they do in the latest Pentium blazer, and they don't use advanced formats. Let's keep it low tech -- PNG is an unnecessary complication for the project. Thanks for listening.
Amazon.com is making money with it's website. We aren't. We are volunteers and thus don't have any pressure from people living in 1998. Don't forget, it's just a small logo in the upper left corner. If you don't see it you won't miss anything.
ciao, tom
On Thu, 24 Jul 2003 21:11:07 EDT, Ralphem@aol.com gave utterance to the following:
Eric, There is a basic problem with your logo, logo contest, and use of art in general -- a good number of us out here cannot see them! ALL of the art on your pages discusssing the logo contest come up with a red X in place of the art. You discuss the fact that you want all logo designs in PNG format, but this is a format that not all systems (Mac) and not all browsers (AOL 5.0, the only software available for older Power PC Macs) support -- so you are cutting out a sizeable portion of potential viewership.
Are you sure about that? It sounds very strange to me, because for years Windows users have had to put up with the default viewer for png being taken over by that most famous piece of cross-platform Appleware, Quicktime. And last time I checked out Opera 4 and 5 on my crusty old 75MHz MacpowerPC it was showing pngs just fine and dandy (except for alpha-transparency, which came with Opera 6, but you won't find many alpha-transparent PNG's on the web anyway given that MSIE can't handle them.
Ralphem@aol.com wrote:
JPEG AND GIF are the standards for use on the web
In addition to what other people have already mentioned (JPEG is lossy and thus unsuitable for logos and other discrete-tone graphics; GIF is (currently) patent-contaminated and therefore cannot be used with GFDL), I would also like to point out that GIF has a lot of actual technical limitations that, in themselves, already make it not a choice for most application: * Limited to 256 colours * Therefore, in a sense, also lossy. A >256 colour image will need to be reduced in colour depth. This results in dithering or diffusion, which greatly hurts the compression ratio * Only single-colour transparency * gzip compression (which PNG uses) often outperforms the patented LZW compression (which GIF uses)
I really hate GIF. Does it show?
Timwi
Timwi wrote:
GIF is (currently) patent-contaminated and therefore cannot be used with GFDL),
Under my understanding, this is not completely correct. The patent situation pertains to software to create the images, not the images themselves. If someone uses properly licensed software to create the gif images, then there are no license compatibility issues involved with redistribution.
Having said that, I generally agree with the FSF policy -- "But we feel that if we can't distribute the software to enable people to generate GIF files properly, then we should not have other people run such software for us."
So I think we should disfavor gifs. But let's not imagine that we are forced to do so by the terms fo the GNU FDL.
Also, the FSF says: "We were able to search the patent databases of the USA, Canada, Japan, and the European Union. The Unisys patent expired on 20 June 2003 in the USA, but it does not expire in most of Europe until 18 June 2004, in Japan until 20 June 2004 and in Canada until 7 July 2004."
So, the whole thing will be history soon anyway.
--Jimbo
On Thu, Aug 07, 2003 at 04:52:08AM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
So, the whole thing will be history soon anyway.
But we know that PNG is better, so yes, GIF is history.
;-)
grin
ps: but it's not a real question anyway. 'pedia logos were and are PNGs so if you don't see them now, you shouldn't run in the logo contest. :-)
Ralphem@aol.com wrote:
JPEG AND GIF are the standards for use on the web
From [[PNG]]:
Version 1.0 of the PNG specification was released on 1 July http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_1 1996 http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996, and later appeared as RFC 2083 http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFC_2083. It became a W3C http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium Recommendation on 1 October http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_1 1996 http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996.
Having an RFC makes it an Internet standard, being recommended by the W3C makes it a web standard. Simple solution: update your browser.
Jimmy O'Regan wrote:
Ralphem@aol.com wrote:
JPEG AND GIF are the standards for use on the web
From [[PNG]]:
Version 1.0 of the PNG specification was released on 1 July http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_1 1996 http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996, and later appeared as RFC 2083 http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFC_2083. It became a W3C http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium Recommendation on 1 October http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_1 1996 http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996.
Having an RFC makes it an Internet standard, being recommended by the W3C makes it a web standard. Simple solution: update your browser.
That attitude is nothing more than techie talk.
Many users are satisfied with machinery that fulfils their basic requirements. I expect that many Wikipedia users, who are promarily interested in WP's text contents, fall in that category. They are quite rightly annoyed when they are constantly asked to upgrade or update their systems to accomodate a technical feature that they never wanted and will probably never use. Keeping track of RFC's may be fine for the techies, but it leaves the average user in a fog of confusion. For many users the simple idea of needing to upgrade is extremely stressful.
Thomas Koll's attitude that anyone with hardware or software more than 4 years old must be mad strikes me as terribly elitist. IMHO backward compatibility should permit nearly full access to Wikipedia for any system up to 10 years old, perhaps even older. Of course some features will not work, and many will be restricted by only being able to use ISO 8859 coding instead of Unicode. Although it's not on line my older machine that functions on MSDOS 3.2 still works fine, and does everything that I want it to. Maybe I'm just one of those old farts that considers it wasteful to demote a perfectly good machine to the status of doorstop. Some years ago when I stopped using my first computer, an Apple II+ that had been upgraded to have 64K of RAM, I resented the wastefulness of such an action. It's still kicking around somewhere doing nothing, and I suppose that if I wanted I could fire it up again (if I remember how).
The other important aspect about backward compatibility relates to schools and the education system. I think that most Wikipedians would be very happy to see a greater use of WP in the schools. The problem is that many schools are plagued with old equipment. In school districts with serious funding problems computers are not a first priority, and many kids complain that they have better equipment at home than at school. For those kids that don't have a home computer the problem is more serious.
These are all things that should be considered when you say that people with equipment older than 4 years old are mad.
Eclecticology
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Jimmy O'Regan wrote:
(stuff)
That attitude is nothing more than techie talk.
Yeah. But the guy (and I'm basing the presumption on his name, just in case anyone points out the thread on gender neutrality) said JPG and GIF were the web standards, I said, in an admittedly techie way, that PNG was also.
Many users are satisfied with machinery that fulfils their basic requirements. I expect that many Wikipedia users, who are promarily interested in WP's text contents, fall in that category. They are quite rightly annoyed when they are constantly asked to upgrade or update their systems to accomodate a technical feature that they never wanted and will probably never use. Keeping track of RFC's may be fine for the techies, but it leaves the average user in a fog of confusion. For many users the simple idea of needing to upgrade is extremely stressful.
Well, for people who want text only, lynx works perfectly, I've just checked. If people want all the bells and whistles, there's a certain level of features their browser should support - it's not like we have flash, VRML and real video streams all over the shop. This person wanted us to switch from PNG to GIF and JPG because he, a minority of one so far, couldn't view them. What next? A friend of mine still uses the browser that OS/2 came with in 1995, which doesn't support JPG. Should we get rid of the JPGs for him? And yes, I realise upgrading scares a lot of people, but there's a tech recession, they should be able to get a good price from a tech :-P
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Jimmy O'Regan wrote:
Many users are satisfied with machinery that fulfils their basic requirements. I expect that many Wikipedia users, who are promarily interested in WP's text contents, fall in that category. [...] IMHO backward compatibility should permit nearly full access to Wikipedia for any system up to 10 years old, perhaps even older.
It does though. People with hardware and software that is 10 years old can perfectly well read the text, and perhaps even view some (if not most) of the images. Which leads us to what you said yourself:
Of course some features will not work
which is exactly the point. People get access to the really important stuff (the text) in a backwards-compatible fashion. HTML is backwards-compatible. CSS declarations and JavaScript are commented out for backwards compatibility. Even UTF-8 is backwards-compatible with ASCII, and tomorrow's Internet protocol (IPv6) will be backwards-compatible with the current protocol (IPv4).
They just can't view the PNGs. Similarly, as mentioned before, users of an old version of OS/2 can't view JPEGs. If they are so desperate to view all the images, then they certainly would have upgraded; if they use 10-year-old hardware and software, then they probably don't make very high demands at technology and are more easily satisfied.
Analogously, they won't be able to view the Hebrew (Russian, Chinese, whatever) Wikipedia if their 10-year-old technology can't interpret UTF-8; but then again, there's probably no way it can do Hebrew anyway, so it does not matter that they cannot read UTF-8.
Of course we know old software and hardware are still in use, and they do have their right to exist and continue to exist, but technology is also advancing, and there's no reason to stay back in stone age. That would be a major obstacle, as shown above: Without UTF-8, or Unicode in general, a lot of languages aren't representable at all. (Maybe Hebrew has an 8-bit character set, but that's not the point.) If someone views an English article with a few Chinese characters in it, and they can't view the Chinese characters, they still have the rest of the article (which usually also contains Pinyin transliterations, etc.).
It's not like we're requiring the newest/latest technology. It's just that users of 10-year-old technology will get only what their technology can offer.
Greetings, Timwi
Jimmy O'Regan wrote:
Having an RFC makes it an Internet standard
As stated in FAQ #3 at http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfcfaq.html, this is not actually true. It is an extremely widely-spread misconception.
An RFC is an Internet standard if and only if the RFC actually says so. Take, for example, RFC 854 (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc854.html): it states explicitly at the top that it is an Internet standard. In contrast, RFC 2549 (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2549.html) specifically mentions that "It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind." Now, in the case of that latter RFC this is not much of a surprise (it's one of numerous April Fool's jokes among the RFCs), but it may come as a surprise to a great many people that the same sentence is contained in the PNG RFC: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2083.html
Greetings, Timwi
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