Re: PNG roots and farewell

I'm not an active member of the PNG development community, nor have I
contributed anything to the core PNG project, but as someone who's based a
large part of an important project on an extension of PNG I think Willem
has said something that I really think needs to be reiterated.

The stagnation in the PNG community over the concern of purity is
eventually going to strangle out PNG. That's not to say that focusing on
core purity is a bad thing - in fact as many would say it's what makes PNG
so good; but if that core purity is of such high concern then EXIF
shouldn't even be an issue because it would mean tainting PNG. But EXIF
would, as others have pointed out, allow PNG to be used in a much wider
variety of very practical situations - situations PNG would not be used for
without EXIF.

It seems to me that this focus on purity will cause stagnation that will
slowly strangle out PNG. It's already happened with animated PNG, where the
push for MNG and obsession with purity has lead to something like 15 years
of animated GIF dominance when an acceptance of an official APNG standard
would have probably totally eliminated GIF usage by now. Exclusion of EXIF
based on purity will remove using PNG as an option in a massive variety of
use cases like IoT imaging devices or a default image format for mobile
apps, and 15 years from now we'll look back and say "this could have been
PNG if we'd only said yes!".

But again, my opinion is of little value here. The developers of PNG have
created something absolutely fantastic and I respect you all immensely. I
just don't want to see PNG fade into obscurity or be overshadowed by other
formats for things PNG could have been spectacular at.

Regards and respect,
-Rei

2017-02-08 14:06 GMT+09:00 Willem van Schaik <[email protected]>:

>
> to all you folks ... keep up the good work
>
> farewell !!
>
> Willem
>
>
>
> On 2017-02-07 21:18, Glenn Randers-Pehrson wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Feb 7, 2017 at 9:51 PM, Willem van Schaik <[email protected]
> > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >     Glenn, how do I unsubscribe ??  not a joke !!
> >
> >
> > I'm not the list manager, but I guess you can unsubscribe by visiting
> >
> >
> >
> >     https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/png-mng-misc
> >     <https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/png-mng-misc>
> >
> >
> > I'm not encouraging you to do that, however.
> >
> > Glenn
> >
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
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> >
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>
> --
> Willem van Schaik
> [email protected]
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
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