Re: PNG roots and farewell

On 2017-02-08 22:40, 影月　零 wrote:
>
> The stagnation in the PNG community over the concern of purity is 
> eventually going to strangle out PNG.
That is my worry also.

> 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.
Right. We are not in the situation of wanting to preserve PNG exactly as 
it was with no changes allowed. Instead, it is more that changes are 
needed and the current, somewhat baroque process impedes changes, as 
does the adversarial tone of discussions.
> 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.
Yes.

I got involved with PNG at the start, not so much as a replacement for 
GIF (though I wanted that, clearly) but as a replacement for RGB TIFF.

Despite advantages of PNG (16bit/component support, good compression 
compared to uncompressed or LZW-compressed TIFF) that hasn't really 
happened, and the lack of EXIF is one reason for that.

I was interested in seeing an EXIF-in-PNG proposal suceed, for two 
reasons - one because it is useful in itself, the other to see whether a 
re-awakened PNG group was actually functional.
>
> It seems to me that this focus on purity will cause stagnation that 
> will slowly strangle out PNG.
It will, and it has.

> 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.
Right. I see that WhatWG has listed animated PNG as an unmaintained 
spec. I see increasing use of APNG. I had hoped to re-raise the issue of 
APNG, once the EXIF proposal succeeded. I'm still wondering whether that 
is a good idea.

> 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!".
Well put.
>
> But again, my opinion is of little value here.
I disagree. You expressed something that needed to be said; you said it 
well, and you also have experience using an extended PNG. Your opinion 
matters.

-- 
Chris Lilley
@svgeesus
Technical Director @ W3C
W3C Strategy Team, Core Web Design
W3C Architecture & Technology Team, Core Web & Media


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