Re: GIF support

[Andres Petralli <apetralli icu unizh ch>]

Hi Russel,

On 26.06.2004, at 13:24, Russell Coker wrote:

> On Sat, 26 Jun 2004 19:30, Andres Petralli <apetralli icu unizh ch> 
> wrote:
>
> GIF   PNG  JPG
> 57.3% 8.7% 34.1%
> 69.9% 1.4% 28.7%

I'm sorry, but the numbers are completly irrelevant. The sampling is 
way too small to give a representative view of the general usage on the 
web. Mind that your squid proxy might serve people who are more tech 
savy than the people who use the web on a proxy like one of i.e. Aol 
and that those people visit more tech savy sites than others.

> Not that it means much.  Often people will just use the easiest format 
> to get
> the job done, I inspected some of the .gif entries in my Squid logs and
> determined that some of them have not changes for years (some appeared 
> to be
> over 5 years old).  So I think that a large cause of the use of gifs 
> on the
> web is the fact that they were created (or created with tools which 
> were
> written) before the patent issue came about.

No, the point most web developers still choose gif over png is that 
they want compatibility with most browsers and handheld web devices. 
It's a fact that png is not or only partially (i.e. no alpha on IE) 
supported by certain browser, most relevantly by MSIE. It's also a fact 
that many web browsers on handheld devices or mobile phones only 
support jpeg, wbmp and maybe gif, but certainly not png. You can still 
tell those developers IE or any other browser is to blame, but they 
will not care because they have to deliver an impecable site to their 
customers without flaws on the most common web browser (95%+ IE on a 
non OSS related site). That's the main reason to choose gif over png.

> ImageMagick makes sense, it's good for tools like that to have as many 
> options
> as possible.

That's a must for ImageMagick to put it clear. For the netpbm package 
it would be too.

> But for PHP I can't see the point.  What would adding GIF creation 
> support
> give to a PHP user?  When you use PHP you want to create a web page, 
> does it
> matter to you whether the web page is comprised of .gif or .png files?

PHP uses picture generation routines with support from the GD library. 
These routines are very popular in WCMS (web content management 
systems) for which php is a strong framework. For the reasons I have 
explained above I think it's crucial that PHP, while being a scripting 
language for the web and thus used in many CMS tools for dynamic 
picture creation of navigational elements and others, includes gif 
support. Actually, it's not php which needs to include it, it's the GD 
library used by php which needs it (and also had before version 1.4).

Sorry, but I think you are misguided by your technical view of the 
things. I agree that png would be supperior, but it's still the user 
(the web developer here) who dictates what he needs. I'm sure that 
there would be a huge demand for gif support especially in PHP 
applications! Also, I really don't want to argue with you wheter to use 
png or gif, my original question simply was, wheter those libraries for 
gif will be re-included into future packages.

Greets,

Andres