APNG New and Notable

I have been meaning to post this for a while now, so its kinda old news. The APNG format for animated PNG images is currently available in Firefox 3 alpha releases. I saw that the latest Opera 9.5 alpha releases also support APNG (look under Other Changes). I am glad to see support for the new format getting some traction.

I also came across an neat variation on Justin Dolske’s APNG image editor extension. Holger Will created an editor that uses SVG (& SMIL) to create APNG images. Updated information here. SVG paired with SMIL-based animations can produce some very good animated PNGs.

Andrew Smith, the guy who worked on APNG in Firefox, also has some examples and a review of Holger’s work here.

4 Replies to “APNG New and Notable”

  1. I would be more interesting if these SMIL/SVG things could be displayed directly within a page, instead of first converting these to APNG.

    The memory usage of APNG’s is huge (width*height*frames*4bytes), while the example SVG’s are very small (only a few K).

    So, let’s extend FF with display support SVG/SMIL!

  2. @Name: It seems the main reason the PNG group rejected APNG was that they felt it should have its own filename extension, instead of using .png. Mozilla and Opera decided that backwards-compatibility was more important. (Browsers that don’t support APNG will just display the first frame as a static PNG.) Implementing APNG as a separate library rather than an extension to PNG would have meant having to use the HTTP_Accept header to swap out APNGs for UAs that didn’t know about them – and who bothered to do that during the PNG/GIF transition?

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