GIF->PNG

GIF->PNG

[Jim Kingdon]

Wanted to inform people about the ongoing project to convert our web
graphics from GIF to PNG.  I started this, on the GDB pages, some
months ago (well before I was a sourceware admin) and haven't gotten
any complaints yet.  So I just checked in the changes to do it for the
top-level pages.  I'd encourage projects to do this (especially if any
of the graphics may have been produced by software not licensed by
Unisaurus - see http://burnallgifs.org/ for the background).  I'm not
planning a "GIF police" though (although somehow those words "GIF
police" do have a nice ring to them).

I have found the most reliable software for doing the conversion is
the GIMP shipped with Red Hat Linux 6.1 (gimp-1.0.4-5).  I have had
trouble - on some images and for some viewers - with
ImageMagick-4.2.9-1, gif2png-2.0.1-1, and older versions of the gimp.

Re: GIF->PNG

[Jason Molenda]

On Mon, Feb 28, 2000 at 09:23:27AM -0000, John Dallaway wrote:

> What about all the surfers out there using older browsers? 

I was curious about this when Unisys started whining about their
patent again last summer, so I started tracking the browser versions
that people connect with.  I sent out a summary back in September
or August of the browsers -- IMHO you are only causing a problem
with a small number of users if you start using PNG these days.

A well designed web page should work even with no graphics turned
on, so these users with older browsers _shouldn't_ be helpless,
although the pages might not look as pretty as they should.

FWIW, in addition to GDB using PNGs, the search engine on sourceware
and gcc.gnu.org have been using PNG images (for things like the
stars which indicate how well a page matches your search criteria)
for a similar length of time with no reported problems.

Unless we were contacted by Unisys on this issue, I wouldn't push
to make all the projects on sourceware stop using GIFs at this
point.  I would encourage everyone to use PNGs, of course, for both
patent avoidance reasons and because PNG is a vastly superior
format.

My two cents,

Jason

PS-  If anyone wants to do up their own stats, look at 
sourceware:/www/logs/sourceware-agent_log.  You'll see lines like 

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)

Which indicates that MS Internet Explorer 5.01 was being used --
it calls itself "Mozilla/4.0" for reasons I don't understand.
Maybe some old web sites looked for this version to indicate a
browser that understands certain features or something.

I could try to dig up my old agent summary that I did a while ago,
I think I sent it to 'hackers'.  All of my old e-mails are now on
a CDROM so it would require a certain amount of effort to find it
myself.

Re: GIF->PNG

[Jim Kingdon]

> I sent out a summary back in September or August of the browsers --
> IMHO you are only causing a problem with a small number of users if
> you start using PNG these days.

Thanks Jason, you said it better than I could have.  I've been
tracking this PNG issue for a long time and holding back because of
the compatibility reasons, but IMHO the time has finally come that PNG
is widely enough supported.  JPEG is also a choice although not a
great one for images of this sort.

Of course this is at least in part a matter of opinion/priorities so
that's part of why Sourceware Central(TM) is not trying to tell the
projects what to do.

> Which indicates that MS Internet Explorer 5.01 was being used --
> it calls itself "Mozilla/4.0" for reasons I don't understand.
> Maybe some old web sites looked for this version to indicate a
> browser that understands certain features or something.

Some new sites do too.  It was a bad idea then (IMHO) and it is a bad
idea now, but some people still do it.

RE: GIF->PNG

[John Dallaway]

Hi Jim,

What about all the surfers out there using older browsers? According to
http://graphicswiz.com/png/pngapbr.html , MSIE and Navigator started to
support .png in their version 4.x releases and the initial support was
pretty basic/broken. There are still a lot of older browsers out there.
For this (purely pragmatic) reason, I do not wish the .gif images on the
eCos sourceware pages to be converted to .png format at this time.

John Dallaway

> -----Original Message-----
> From: overseers-owner@sourceware.cygnus.com
> [ mailto:overseers-owner@sourceware.cygnus.com]On Behalf Of Jim Kingdon
> Sent: 26 February 2000 18:15
> To: overseers@sourceware.cygnus.com
> Subject: GIF->PNG
>
> Wanted to inform people about the ongoing project to convert our web
> graphics from GIF to PNG.  I started this, on the GDB pages, some
> months ago (well before I was a sourceware admin) and haven't gotten
> any complaints yet.  So I just checked in the changes to do it for the
> top-level pages.  I'd encourage projects to do this (especially if any
> of the graphics may have been produced by software not licensed by
> Unisaurus - see http://burnallgifs.org/ for the background).  I'm not
> planning a "GIF police" though (although somehow those words "GIF
> police" do have a nice ring to them).
>
> I have found the most reliable software for doing the conversion is
> the GIMP shipped with Red Hat Linux 6.1 (gimp-1.0.4-5).  I have had
> trouble - on some images and for some viewers - with
> ImageMagick-4.2.9-1, gif2png-2.0.1-1, and older versions of the gimp.