Digital BW, The Print

On Dec 7, 2004, at 1:28 PM, Anthony G. Atkielski wrote:

>
> Roger Howard writes:
>
>> Sorry, I'll include an emoticon next time ;) That was exactly my 
>> point.
>> But it's not industry inertia holding back PNG as a result... it's a
>> single company holding a lot of control and not giving a whit about
>> certain standards. Hopefully now that they've restarted IE development
>> maybe it will get fixed by IE 10, but their product folks have
>> consistently shown zero interest in fixing this, until they hear about
>> it from end-users (who are not going to be the ones complaining).
>
> PNG, like JPEG2000, is largely a solution looking for a problem.

I disagree. 8 bit masks are important for design; getting good layered 
images on the Web with GIF is difficult due to the 1 bit masks - many 
ugly workarounds.  There are many other features of PNG, but I think 
that's really the only important one that warrants wide support, and 
something Web designers have struggled with for, well, ever.

I do agree that in general, marginally better compression efficiency is 
almost never a solution to any real world problem.

Ok, I'm gonna quite her, as I know we're so way OT now it's 
unforgivable. Any general imaging geek lists you know of?

Best,

Roger