[Wikipedia-l] Re: Theora and video policy...

[Rowan Collins [IMSoP]]

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]