Strange that you mention GIF but don't call it evil. Reducing a general image to GIF format is usually far more lossy
I agree with this, for general-purpose images. I would
never, for example, use GIF for icons or wallpaper or
photographs.
Furthermore, GIF is evil due to its licensing.
If the licensing were enforced in anything similar to
the fashion that was briefly threatened, I would agree.
As it stands, in practice, the licensing issues around
GIF are a minor caveat, nothing like the horrific issue
that is JPEG compression.
PNG is a replacement for GIF - not for JPEG.
No, PNG is a replacement for both GIF and JPEG, as
well as TIFF, BMP, XPM, PCX, and so on and so forth.
The only other image formats we still need besides
PNG are more advanced formats (that support things
like layers (XCF) or color-selective opacity, vector
formats (POV, SVG, and so forth), and of course the
venerable text/plain format for ASCII graphics, which
gets better compression than all the others.
JPEG itself isn't evil.
The use of JPEG lossy compression is evil. Lossless
JPEGs aren't evil, but with wide PNG support these
days (wide if you don't need the alpha channel, which
JPEG doesn't have anyway), they're rather pointless.
The lossy compression is usually not something you notice
Notice? NOTICE? It's not a question
of noticing. It's a question of being able to suppress
my negative reaction long enough to look at the image.
When an image (any image, except maybe a solid block
of exactly one colour, though of course it's worst for
text) is compressed lossily, the
compression distortion stands out as *the* predominant
feature of the image. It is the first
thing I notice. It stands out and calls attention to
itself and cannot be ignored.
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split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$ ;->();print$/
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