most efficient graphic format ?

[Roy Schestowitz]

That's trivial - software you'd use to create GIFs will have accounted
for the licence, if one's required. Web developers and graphic
designers don't need to worry about the licence/patent issue.

I didn't realise that. It makes me wonder how (or if) the GIMP needs to pay
for licences of any kind. I assume it makes the exception. There is not
even an estimate of the number of users.

Roy

 

[Ian Rastall]

I would like to hear some confirmations of the support for PNG in browsers
later than 4.

I tried using PNGs to provide a partially-transparent background to a
table, and it worked fine in Firefox, but not in IE 6.

Ian

 

[Toby Inkster]

I tried using PNGs to provide a partially-transparent background to a
table, and it worked fine in Firefox, but not in IE 6.

IE doesn't support alpha-blended (semi-transparent) PNGs, but other than
that supports PNG fairly well. In particular it *does* support PNGs with
binary transparency. There is a hack to get alpha-blending working in IE
5.5+ though.

IE 5.x for Mac supports PNG, including alpha-blending. However, it doesn't
support alpha-blending on *background* images -- only <img> elements.

All Gecko-based browsers (Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, Epiphany, Galeon,
K-Meleon, etc) support PNG, including alpha-transparency.

Netscape has supported PNGs since 4.04 (or perhaps 4.08, I can never
remember). It's supported alpha-blending since 6.0 -- because 6.0 and
above are Gecko-based.

Opera has supported PNGs since 4.0 (I think). Alpha-blending support
depends on the platform. If I recall correctly, Opera for Linux and UNIX
got alpha support in the 5.x versions and Opera for Windows in the 6.0
version. In the 7.0 versions, all supported platforms have alpha-blending.

Konqueror has has PNG support with alpha since at least 3.0. Perhaps
earlier. Apple Safari is based on Konqueror 3.x, so has good support too.
Recent versions of iCab are based on AppleWebKit -- the same rendering
engine as Safari, derived from Konqueror, so offer the same level of
support for PNG.

Nautilus's GtkHTML component supports PNG, including alpha-blending.

That should cover most vaguely-recent graphical browsers.

 

[kchayka]

Recent versions of iCab are based on AppleWebKit -- the same rendering
engine as Safari,

I know that's true of OmniWeb, but I believe iCab has its own engine. At
least I couldn't find anything that indicates it is also KHTML-based.

 

[Toby Inkster]

I know that's true of OmniWeb, but I believe iCab has its own engine. At
least I couldn't find anything that indicates it is also KHTML-based.

Bah! Yes, that's what I meant -- OmniWeb. iCab does indeed use its own
rendering engine.