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About LinkBacksGIF looks bad resized with ImageMagick.
Re: APNG is dumb GIF looks bad resized with ImageMagick.
Re: APNG is dumb Nice GIF vs APNG comparison:
http://animatedpng.com/index.php/samples/8bit-gif-vs-8bit-apng/
APNG is smaller and it looks better. The thread's title is incorrect.
Re: APNG is dumb Size is not an issue with APNG, the example discussed early is justed compressed inefficiently. I could just as well build an arbitrarily huge GIF file if I wanted to.
What it comes down to is that the main competitors are APNG and GIF. Anything else is pretty much out of the picture since support for MNG and the likes is even worse than support for APNG, which is improving, by the way - I remember when all there was were Firefox plugins for APNG creation. Not to mention the fact that APNG is semi-backwards-compatible to PNG.
GIF's strong point is, obviously, support.
The overall superior format in terms of efficiency and features is APNG. Pick your poison.
Re: APNG is dumb There are certain uses for which APNG would clearly be the superior choice, but when dealing with sprites, which have a very small number of colours, there is no obvious advantage that I can see (kindly point it out if there is one, because I feel like I'm missing something here). With no clear advantage to either format, it should then come down to which has the greatest support, and that is clearly GIF.
The trouble is that whenever anybody asks why we insist on using APNG when many browsers don't, the response always comes up: "Well, IE sucks anyway". This attitude, especially when it comes from webmasters, is - and I shall choose my words carefully here - immature, unhelpful and counterproductive. I've designed websites myself, and I know how frustrating it can be, especially when it's some fiendishly complicated CSS issue where Microsoft has been blatantly ignoring standards. But this is a straight choice between a format that's supported by everything, and Mozilla's pet format. And we choose the second one because... um... IE sucks you guys! Get Firefox, lol!
Note that this doesn't even affect me: I'm an Opera user, and by some kind of dumb luck Opera supports APNG. If I was a Chrome user, I'd be out of luck. And I've encountered plenty of situations in the past when Opera doesn't parse some website feature correctly, and it turns out that the webmaster was only coding with Firefox in mind... which is exactly the sort of arrogance that IE users were once accused of.
See, I can recall a time, back in the IE vs Netscape browser wars, when Microsoft was heavily criticised for introducing support for features that weren't supported by competitors. And now we're using an unofficial feature supported by only two browsers, and apparently the reason Microsoft don't support it is that they're dumb. Oh, internet.
Re: APNG is dumb You're mostly right. I could understand why some high-profile websites are dumping IE6 support, it's below 10% now. The same with Opera. But ignoring IE7 and IE8 would be a little too much arrogance.
Practically, the best way would be to detect APNG support, and serve GIF/APNG accordingly.
But still, there are some use cases where using only GIF or only APNG would be better.
Maybe you missed the link in my previous post?
Re: APNG is dumb I saw it, but it's not really relevant. The reason the APNG looks better there is because the image requires variable transparency, which is unsupported by GIF. But we're dealing with sprites that only need the most basic sort of transparency, and as such, GIF is fine for them. The size issue is debatable, but I've seen examples showing just the opposite, and it's mostly a matter of how well you compress your files. Even if we accept those numbers at face value, a 10% difference in file size is surely a small price to pay for universal support.
Re: APNG is dumb Transparent GIF sucks when resized. End of story.
Honestly, APNG is a very good format, but needs more support.
Re: APNG is dumb Agreed here; I'm also of the mindset that APNG is a superior filetype, but the fact of the matter is that even other standards-compliant browsers do not support APNG at the moment. We can do our part to help APNG along, but disabling functionality - animated sprites - for a major selection of our users, just is not worth it.
If this was something that wasn't supported in IE but worked everywhere else, I'd be fully in favor of it. If we were a smaller, more personal site, I'd be fully in favor of it. But it's something that even users who have switched off of IE to better browsers may not be able to experience, and that's not the right way to go about things. It's poor business.
Re: APNG is dumb The truth is that APNG will probably never be universally supported. It was rejected by the PNG group, and was conceived merely as a means of animating elements of Firefox's interface. This isn't some issue where Microsoft are ignoring standards: there is no official standard for APNG. We might as well be using
Re: APNG is dumb You guys forget, Opera can see APNG too.
And if we waited for everything to be standards-compliant to adopt it, everything would just fall by the wayside. We kind of are the first major Pokémon wiki, you know. If we had waited for every other Pokémon website to do the wiki thing first, we'd still have no Pokédex. Hell. If we waited for everyone else to do it first, we'd have no information not copied from elsewhere.
You aren't missing anything by not having APNG enabled. Sprite animations aren't something integral to the wiki. They're just extra little things. yes, even in the sprite chart, which for 90% of the DP sprites, has no animation.
Re: APNG is dumb I did not.Originally Posted by TTEchidna
Re: APNG is dumb I download Chrome for a premium web browsing experience.
Now I get incompatibility issues?
This is unfair!
(Sorry if I sound like a douchey-asshole.)
Re: APNG is dumb Just throwing in a side-note to this debate, bandwidth isn't an issue for us. Load (connections per second) is what drives slowness.
"And we're not gods, we're just hacks."
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Re: APNG is dumb There is no official standard for GIF either.
It never stopped any browser maker from implementing them.
Re: APNG is dumb Um... GIF vs APNG, huh? What's the use of APNG when most browsers can't display the animation(s) of it? In that case, it depends on whether the browser downloads only the static frame or the whole file. If it's the latter, eating up users' bandwidth isn't exactly the smartest move.
Yes, I am aware there *might* be some colour info loss when using GIFs as opposed to APNG. However, I think GIFs are a perfect fit for sprites - they are still using 16-colour sprites these days! As for move images, well... it all depends on the image in question. If it's ingame, and not Gen IV/V, GIFs should suffice. If it's Gen IV/V, APNG might work better, but there's nothing stopping an optimised GIF animation from working well. Anime move images, err... I think it all depends on what's best. I KNOW there are some images where APNG is not a valid option, like the HM-move demonstration GIF. If it were an APNG, there's no such thing as an informational static frame for non-supported browsers in that case.
I sometimes use Bulbapedia with Chrome, and guess what? I see APNG failure - that is, no animations. (By the way, what's the current marketshare of browsers?)
Sprites animations, while not necessary, enhance what I call "The Bulbapedia Experience". And I noticed that just about every sprite there are a perfect fit for GIF. Why not?
If they all implemented these GIF features, might as well as call it a "standard".
I think we should focus on compatibility.
*NOTE: I usually use Firefox for browsing, but I sometimes use Chrome, IE9 and, in extreme cases, Nintendo DSi Browser*
Last edited by Haxy; 16th October 2010 at 05:31 AM.
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