There are many fantastic points and examples in this essay by Phillip Hoyt. One of the most unique items he brings up is the file type's abilities with regards to Gamma Correction.
"From the LibPNG site: "Gamma correction basically refers to the ability to correct for differences in how computers (and especially computer monitors) interpret color values." There are two factors here: the ability to predict what an image, say a photograph, will look like on another monitor; and the ability to match the colours from different sources on a single page.
"The type of a PNG image is defined in the IHDR image header. The image has a certain bit depth, up to 16 bits per sample, and a certain color type, from Grayscale to RGB+Alpha. If two PNG files of different types represent exactly the same image, each file can be regarded as a lossless transformation of the other. A lossless transformation can reduce the uncompressed stream, and such a transformation is named image reduction. In most cases, image reductions are capable of reducing the compressed stream (which is, in fact, our interest), as an indirect
This document specifies version 1 of the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL 1.0, pronounced "smile"). SMIL allows integrating a set of independent multimedia objects into a synchronized multimedia presentation. Using SMIL, an author can
describe the temporal behavior of the presentation
describe the layout of the presentation on a screen
associate hyperlinks with media objects
This specification is structured as follows: Section 2 presents the specification approach. Section 2 defines the "smil" element. Section 3 defines the
This page is an attempt to provide an easily digested PNG status board--basically a place to come and see how PNG currently fares for those who haven't been keeping up with the news page or mailing lists. It grew out of an article submitted to Slashdot in February 1999 (with a followup in June 2000), but it is intended to be more dynamic and has been redesigned accordingly.
Stability: excellent * * * * *
The PNG specification has proven to be exceptionally solid. There have been two minor updates since the 1.0 release--to clarify gamma handling and to
Introduction
This document proposes an image format for storing full-color image values in 16-bit pixels. The data representation itself need not be in a PNG (Portable Network Graphics) envelope, but PNG does provide a natural and widely accepted framework for this proposal. PNG is now one of the three image formats supported by the major browsers (Netscape and Internet Explorer), and Microsoft has even declared it to be its primary lossless image format within the Office 98 software suite.
Why 16 bits? Well, 8 bits per pixel is inadequate for
The PNG format provides a portable, legally unencumbered, well-compressed, well-specified standard for lossless bitmapped image files.
Although the initial motivation for developing PNG was to replace GIF, the design provides some useful new features not available in GIF, with minimal cost to developers.
GIF features retained in PNG include:
* Indexed-color images of up to 256 colors.
* Streamability: files can be read and written serially, thus allowing the file format to be used as a communications protocol for on-the-fly generation and
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