Re: Writing GIFs
--Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com> wrote
(on Wednesday, 11 September 2002, 09:16 PM -0600):
> Craig Dickson <crdic@pacbell.net> [2002-09-11 10:55:37 -0700]:
> > I realize I am a terrible person for wanting to violate Unisys's
> > patents, but I'm working on a web site that I think will often be
> > visited by people with old browsers (it's the site for the elementary
> > school my daughter attends), so rather than use PNGs, I think I'd be
> > better off with GIFs.
>
> I have always prefered jpegs since they load faster. I like that fact
> that most browsers will show you the image as it downloads and
> therefore it feels faster to me on slow connections.
>
> Don't all browsers support .jpg format? (I really don't know but had
> always assumed so.)
Yes, but then there's the aspect of transparency -- jpegs cannot do
transparency; gifs can. This is part of the reason png is seen as a nice
format -- it has taken strengths from both jpeg and gif formats.
Unfortunately, it doesn't compress as much (in tests I've done, pngs
of images tend to be larger than an equivalent jpeg), and older browsers
(read Netscape 4, IE 4) don't read them. (Somebody correct me if I'm
wrong -- but some of my clients use older versions of each of these
browsers and cannot see pngs.)
--Matthew
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