APNG is a good thing. Some people think it’s not, that it’s just Mozilla carving its own course. It’s not Mozilla just being difficult, it’s that MNG missed the mark by a mile. Don’t believe me? Turns out other companies have encountered similar situations, as Raymond Chen explains why it’s ok to reimplement a subset of functions as a simple solution to a simple problem.
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As long as the PNG Group rejects APNG and W3C doesn’t support APNG, it’s going nowhere. The standards were already set in MNG and it worked in Mozilla Suite just fine, but Mozilla had to be difficult and removed MNG support just to save a measly 300kb in filesize, setting good quality animated images years back because of stubborn misguided views.
Hope everyone enjoys using GIF for a long time.
Not only does the APNG hack do little that couldn’t be done with a few lines of javascript and a background-image PNG, it doesn’t support JNG, something that wastes a lot more space on the web every day than those 300kb back then (yes, even if fallbacks were needed for IE, which will need them for APNG *anyway*).
But yes, it is certainly true that those folks supporting APNG were instrumental in finding excuses to kill off MNG.
BTW, if you read https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=204520
you’ll see that it was even less than 300kb in the end.
Not that it mattered at that point.
People who loved MNG are resenful at APNG, but that’s unfair.
MNG died from a lack of popularity long time ago. APNG has nothing to do with that.
Well, APNG is not directly involved, I’m just noting the Mozilla decision to eliminated MNG which had a great deal to do with this “lack of popularity” was driven by advocates of the just as unpopular but even more useless APNG.
No, MNG died before Mozilla’s decision.
Besides, Mozilla is not that powerful. It’s proven by the fact that APNG is still not popular, despite all their effort.
Ultimatelly, people will decide with their feet. If they’ll massively start writing plug-ins for Photoshop/Gimp/Browers/etc for one format, that format will win.
meh. MNG didn’t have much of a draw, but that was because PNG was just barely establishing itself at time.
Of course, Mozilla market share was much smaller than.
But there is no adequate replacement for the JNG capability of MNG – the animation, sure, that can be hacked around with sucky GIFs, PNG slideshow tricks, flash or videos. But JNG, not so much.
If Mozilla had kept it in place, I assure you I would have used it. Adequate fall-back chains in CSS, JS and object tags could be done, for a reasonable benefit. Momentum would have picked up.
The “people will write plugins for it” is a bit silly. By that standard, Firefox wouldn’t have quite a few new features that are in core and not supported by IE.
Oh well. All academic at this point.
At this point, yes, MNG would have to compete against Flash. Which is pretty much inpossible.
APNG tries to compete against GIF, and who knows… maybe it could get a decent share.
Standalone JNG is another story.
APNG would take off like a rocket if it embraced all the folks with pocket video cameras. Imagine taking a photo but instead it lasts 3-7 seconds long. If people could take mini-clips with their iphones and pocket cameras and upload them to be viewed as easily as jpegs it would change the world of photography. Shoot it and share it.
What it needs is a limit on play time. 7 seconds or less. And a name that’s catchy.. “microvid” only much better than that.
Sure you can do all that with Video. But that’s a workaround to sharing an album of snapshots that move just like it was an album of photos.
Every mom would jump on board in a heartbeat because posting a 5 second clip of her 2 year-old blowing bubbles to youtube is kind of obnoxious and not worth the effort. But sharing a photo is something we do every day.