Re: tlug: Bound Gimp manual?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "jb" == Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com> writes:

    jb> On Mon, 5 Oct 1998, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

    >> Make two images, one with PNG (which supports a reasonable
    >> number of colors) and one with GIF, and let the users of
    >> proprietary image formats kiss them goodbye.

    jb> And I'm going to go to all the trouble to make sure of which
    jb> browser versions support which PNG features

You should ....

    jb> Riiiiiiiiiight.

:-)  But I'm not even going to try to make you.  However, please note
for the future that HTTP does have a standard way to negotiate all
kinds of features of the communication (language, image formats,
encoding, bla bla) and I for one would like to see browsers smart
enough to negotiate on my behalf (don't send me GIFs, I dislike them
on principle; texts less than 1kB I want in Japanese, else English)
and sites that respect my preferences.

I imagine that most surfers will be push-model surfers for the
forseeable future:  "feed me lots of images and other pure-calorie
zero-nutrient frosting and I'm happy."  OTOH, people with the need to
optimize time probably have money to spend.  Maybe there's a niche for
smart sites (ones that respect a user's "preference sheet" in the same
way that browsers now can respect "style sheets").

    jb> Oh, and since you seem to dislike bloated files, you should
    jb> disklike PNG, too - PNG files are typically far larger than
    jb> either a .gif or .jpg representation of a given image.

Apples and oranges, my good man.  256-color PNGs compare favorably
with 256-color GIFs in my (admittedly, very limited) experience; I
know that when XEmacs eliminated all GIFs from etc/ in favor of PNG
the du on that directory went down by about 4%, although the number of
images increased by 2.  zlib is a better compressor than LZW, although
not much in this application.  And 2-color PNGs beat both 256-color
GIFs and any JPEG to _death_.  But who cares?  ;^)

More to the point, my eyes are bad enough that I cannot distinguish
between true-color and a 4096-color PNG.  No banding, etc.  But it's
normally only about 3x-5x the size of a 256-color PNG or GIF.  That's
a very useful tradeoff, YMMV, of course.

And PNG is lossless, at least for the application I have in mind
(replacing GIF); if you're willing to lose information, of course JPEG
is smaller.

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