I don't know whether to be more mad at Unisys (who are enforcing the patent that makes GIFs a licensed commodity), Compuserve (who created a popular file format that used patented processes), the US Patent Office (who permit software patents), or the big browser makers (for not having good PNG support in existing browsers).

Yup. The GIF LZW patent expires in all countries in June/July (depending on the country). The Unisys LZW Patent Page has the exact dates. Last ones to go are the European countries on July 7.

The question in my mind, is "is it worth it to put GIF support back into things"? PNG is a better format all around -- not surprising, considering the GIF format is from 1987 (with revisions in 1989), and untouched since then. 'Old' ne 'bad', I know, but GIF is an old format, with tradeoffs that no longer make sense.

PNG gives better compression, better metadata, and better color depth. Even without the difference in patent-encumberation being an issue, PNG is still clearly better then GIF.

PNG is superior in every way, except one, which might be the most important in practice: vendor support. IE doesn't support it's transparency correctly, and Photoshop has a piss-poor PNG compressor (last I checked, you're actually better off not compressing PNGs at all in Photoshop). Those two products make up the most common way of viewing and creating images, respectively.

Further, since Microsoft says there aren't going to be any more updates to IE until Longhorn comes out, and it'll take at least 1-2 years before a significant fraction of MS users are on the new OS, we're going to see at least three more years of IE non-functionality of PNG support (unless the recently announced "XP Reloaded" changes the IE release, too).

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Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

I strongly suspect that XP Reloaded will come with IE Reloaded, and be the only way to get some of it's funky new features.

I doubt it will improve anything that users are not crying for, and that doesn't yeild itself to a bit in a magizine article showing what cool new features it has.

The idea of Reloaded seems to be to get a new box on shelves and people buying it like a new product when it's really not, with as little development time as possible, because every day somebody works on this is a day they aren't working on Loghorn.

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Warning: Unless otherwise stated, code is untested. Do not use without understanding. Code is posted in the hopes it is useful, but without warranty. All copyrights are relinquished into the public domain unless otherwise stated. I am not an angel. I am capable of error, and err on a fairly regular basis. If I made a mistake, please let me know (such as by replying to this node).

Very true about transparency.

I'd just add that png does not support animated images.