The W3C is at it again!
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I don't get why the MNG format never took off.
Well; we have APNG. Fairly broad support except ofcourse in IE, and weirdly: Chrome.
Even Apple added support for it to Safari.
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Once, again, the patent system ruining things.
What I like the most is how nobody can know if something is patent-free or not. Makes developing new formats fun an exciting, like gambling on a racing track. Will I be sued for this? Will I have to retroactively pay royalties for every image or video served from my site? Who knows! Better wait 20 years before using anything, just to be sure.
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If you couldn't tell by what Ragnax said, MNG and APNG were in a standards war.
IE chose to support neither side until IE10, when they decided to back MNG.Edit: Apparently I was wrong, IE doesn't support MNG.
As it is right now:
- IE supports neither
- Chrome supports MNG
- Firefox supports APNG
- Safari / iOS supports APNG
- Android supports neither
Chrome and Firefox can each support the other format via a browser plugin, but not out of the box.
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Eh, hopefully it won't matter now that websites are starting to accept WebMs in place of images.
People always end up using GIFs to post short videos, so it's better replaced by a video format.
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(Yes, I'm ignoring the whole 256 color thing as it wasn't on your list.)
Turns out to be Not A Problem. You can switch palettes between each frame and you can set the delay between frames to be zero. Which is evil as hell but works with how all modern systems actually implement GIF support.
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Fixed. Briefly wondered what was wrong with it earlier. Didn't bother investigating.
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I looked at the raw just to find out what the abbreviation meant, not to investigate why it wasn't working, but it was pretty obvious. I think I noticed the missing
=before I even read the text.
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The W3C was going to include OGG in the standard but Apple and Nokia killed it.
The OGG container is a WTF in itself. It's a dumb stream multiplexing format that doesn't have an index or any metadata. The standard just says "Decoders should examine the contained streams to find a suitable decoder". So seeking is pretty much a binary search (or "beam" search) on a file on disk.A few years after the container format specification came out a third-party threw together a non-standard DirectShow filter to mux to that container using AVI headers at the start of each stream. That's the ogm format.
A few years after that the OGG standard was updated with a special metadata stream format that can be used to find out what's in the individual streams. I think files that contain this usually have the extension ogv. This is of course not compatible with ogm.
I believe a large majority of the content available online right now is ogm, not ogv.
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So much fuss over such a lack of equality. Thanks guys, I didn't know you cared
No! Really!
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I. Love. Discourse.
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In the Real World™ nobody uses Theora and Nokia is right on this one, the HTML standard shouldn't mingle with standard codecs, neither Theora or MPEG. The same goes for the containers and the DRMs
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The HTML standard itself shouldn't say anything about codecs and so on. It also shouldn't say anything about what formats need to be supported for images or sound (or other forms of page-embedded media). There might be value in defining an auxiliary standard profile with recommendations for what formats and codecs should be supported for such things, but the HTML standard itself should stay aloof.
It looks like MP3 is now patent-free in all countries except the US, which has to wait until September.
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Nobody uses Theora now because we got VP8 from Google which is better. At the time (2007) it was the best we had.
And yes, OGG, Theora and Vorbis are not the best formats around, but that doesn't matter. From what I've seen, the best way to handle multiple formats is to have a "baseline" standard that all devices support, and let people use different ones at their own risk, until everyone is ready to jump to the "next baseline" many years later.
And IMO the HTML5 standard should definitely define some standard codecs. Otherwise there is no way to know that a document will work in a browser, even if both are "valid HTML5". Of course, this should also be applied to images (require browsers to support at least PNG).
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Look, if a file format specifies the container but not the codecs, then it's not a format. It's shit. So don't request that, don't use that as file extension, don't use that as MIME type, and don't ask the browser if it supports it. It's stupid. You might as well ask if the browser supports "binary".
A "format" should define everything necessary to actually use the file.
On a side note, XML is precisely the same case (so are JSON and YML).
The whole reason we're in this bloody mess is because a number of prominent stakeholders (notably; the browser vendors) were unable to settle on a core set of containers and codecs
Absolutely not necessary. It would be enough to define mime-type for each codec rather than just each container. Mime-types can be composed with
+or come with parameters after;, so it would be possible.Note that some xml-based formats do that (
text/xml+whatever) and some don't.
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And yes, OGG, Theora and Vorbis are not the best formats around, but that doesn't matter. From what I've seen, the best way to handle multiple formats is to have a "baseline" standard that all devices support, and let people use different ones at their own risk, until everyone is ready to jump to the "next baseline" many years later.
The baseline is already H.264 and AAC. And has been for a decade. Most devices that play video have hardware chips that decode it already.
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If you couldn't tell by what Ragnax said, MNG and APNG were in a standards war.
Firefox wanted an image format that did animation, better than GIF89a and unencumbered by patents. The PNG development group said "Cool! We have Motion PNG, or MNG! It should be perfect!" Mozilla responded, "Uh... but it doesn't show up in browsers that don't do MNG, there's no place for fallback content, and it requires us to lug around this JPEG-in-PNG garbage no one ever uses..." The reply: "Just use MNG!"So Firefox came up with their own format that decorates a PNG with ancillary data blocks that represent more PNGs. It requires nothing more than a simple PNG decoder, and it degrades gracefully to a single PNG image if not supported. They tried to run it by the PNG standards committee, who said something like "We can never accept this; it's motion graphics, so it should use the MNG signature", while Firefox kept replying "if it uses the MNG signature it won't show up in any browser in the history of ever." And that's where we are today. Except Chrome thew JNG and MNG into their libpr0n for whatever reason. Probably by accident.
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Firefox is to blame for this shit?
That does not surprise me.
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Well, we could go back to just using GIF everywhere, and keep getting extortion letters from Unisys and dither vomit on our screens.
Mozilla wanted something simple: an animated image, which looks nice, isn't encumbered by patents, and doesn't cease to exist in non-supporting browsers. APNG fits that, even if it's a hack job. MNG does not, even if it is technically far superior.
Oh, and before anyone says "WebP", they can go die in a fire fueled by their ironic idiocy.
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Well, we could go back to just using GIF everywhere,
That seems to be exactly what happened.
and keep getting extortion letters from Unisys
... seriously? Are we time-podding again?
Mozilla wanted something simple: an animated image, which looks nice, isn't encumbered by patents, and doesn't cease to exist in non-supporting browsers.
Ok; and since they were all fucking around debating instead of actually getting their format out to the people, we're still stuck with GIF.
But... EVERYBODY BOW BEFORE THE TECHNICAL SUPERIORITY!!! TECHNICAL SUPERIORITY IS THE ONLY FACTOR INFLUENCING THE SUCCESS OF A TECHNOLOGY!
Wait, no. Sorry. This is the real world, where even the open source dumbshits are using Git and Linux. You (and Mozilla) are off in this weird-ass fantasy-land where birds talk and the sun is lifted aloft by singing fairies every morning.
The point is, there was a really really long window of time for a GIF replacement to come online. Mozilla fucked it up.
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Well, we could go back to just using GIF everywhere, and keep getting extortion letters from Unisys and dither vomit on our screens.
The thing about LZW is that it was made in the early 80s.
Unisys can't sue any more as the LZW patent expired a decade ago.
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Unisys can't sue any more as the LZW patent expired a decade ago.
Yes, and the MP3 patent set finishes expiring this year. In two months.
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Note how APNG works, even a little, in every browser? That's what the whole fucking argument was about, and Mozilla was on the correct side of that argument.
Oh, and by the way? Chrome's support for MNG goes against the PNG standards committee. According to them, it belongs in a
<video>tag. It's thanks to their pedantic dickweedery that Mozilla had to create the abomination that's APNG, a full decade after it should have.
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Note how APNG works, even a little, in every browser?
Yes, thank you, I get that.
That's what the whole fucking argument was about, and Mozilla was on the correct side of that argument.
Right; but the point of the exercise was to replace the GIF format, and that didn't happen. So while they might have been on the "correct" side of the argument, while they were arguing nothing fucking happened to replace the GIF format and so we're still stuck with GIFs today.
You can be on the "correct" side of the argument and still be a useless piece of shit who doesn't accomplish anything at all. These two things are not mutually-exclusive.
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...And in conclusion, that's why it is Microsoft's fault that open source developers choose to use git instead of TFS.
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I'm not 100% sure that the fallback to a single image is a good idea... I'd rather see no content at all than see a static image with no indication that something is wrong.
If things have to fail, make the failure clear and make it happen as soon as possible. Wasn't that one of the basic ideas of modern programming?
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You can be on the "correct" side of the argument and still be a useless piece of shit who doesn't accomplish anything at all. These two things are not mutually-exclusive.
Mozilla accomplished the replacement of GIF with APNG just fine in their own browser and all other browsers gracefully fall back to normal PNG where APNG is not supported. However, the PNG standards committee cock-blocked Mozilla on elevating it to a full standard because MNG was their own little precious snowflake they wanted to push.
No other browser is interested in touching non-standardized image formats thanks to the fallout ensuing from the whole
<video>element codec debacle ... and so we come full circle back to post #1 in the thread...I'm not 100% sure that the fallback to a single image is a good idea... I'd rather see no content at all than see a static image with no indication that something is wrong.
If things have to fail, make the failure clear and make it happen as soon as possible. Wasn't that one of the basic ideas of modern programming?
The primary tenent of the web is the robustness principle: be conservative in what you do and be liberal in what you accept. Graceful fallback to a static image fits that principle. We tried failing early and failing hard before; do you remember XHTML?
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We tried failing early and failing hard before; do you remember XHTML?
XHTML was fucked up in other ways, but the principle of “fail early” is a good one. The problem with a lot of XHTML stuff in practice was that some tools were not failing early, letting things that weren't XHTML be claimed to be that. It doesn't take many
in the pool to persuade people to GTFO…That and some people insisted on generating XML using simple textual substitutions. Idiots.
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XHTML was fucked up in other ways, but the principle of “fail early” is a good one.
I looked for this and found nothing about this claim. XHTML is nothing more than sane HTML.
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XHTML is nothing more than sane HTML.
They removed a number of attributes IIRC. Broke a lot of people's HTML, so people just didn't port things over.
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It was impossible to embed a Flash movie in XHTML Strict. That alone was enough to kill it off back when it was being promoted.
Not to mention the entire concept was bonkers. How does turning the web into XML help make browsers less complex? THEY STILL HAVE TO PARSE HTML4! YOU'VE JUST ADDED YET ANOTHER PARSER!
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Not to mention the entire concept was bonkers.
Yes, because this:
<UL> <LI><FONT color="red">red</FONT> <li>Blue</li> <LI>Green </UL>Is much better.
They removed a number of attributes IIRC. Broke a lot of people's HTML, so people just didn't port things over.
They who? The W3C gods?
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Is much better.
No it's not, but what does adding XHTML gain you? How does it improve the situation?
The site with that old markup doesn't magically go away because XHTML is here now! It's there forever. Browsers still have to deal with it.
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They who? The W3C gods?
Generic “they” for all I know; I just tried to use it, not to write implementations or the spec. What I do know is that it was an unholy mess.
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No it's not, but what does adding XHTML gain you? How does it improve the situation?
Client-side XSLT let you create human-readable versions of XML pages that were genuinely useful. Provided you avoided the stuff which didn't work (which wasn't just Flash) and didn't use IE.
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Client-side XSLT let you create human-readable versions of XML pages that were genuinely useful.
Ok...?
I don't see how that answers my question even slightly.
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I don't see how that answers my question even slightly.
Well, I can't be bothered to answer any more deeply. I've been dealing with students much of the day (worse, students with good relevant questions that I can't really help them with) and I've got a product demo to go to before going home. My inclination to think hard is getting run very thin.
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Wow, well, thank you for posting random shit with absolutely no relevance to anything, then. Good strategy for building respect and making friends because it's not at all a complete waste of everybody's time.
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Good strategy for building respect and making friends
I'm sure you're an specialist at that. Maybe you should do some consulting.
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Time for retro HTML 3 - when things were so simple, methinks.
Yes, fetched by the lovely version of HTTP used by IE3 on Win95 OSR2. I installed it on a machine, for largely inadmissible reasons, around 2000, and I couldn't download a more recent version of IE because Microsoft's own web servers wouldn't listen to HTTP/0.9 ...
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Except Chrome thew JNG and MNG into their libpr0n for whatever reason. Probably by accident.
They don't. Basically nobody supports MNG/JNG.
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The primary tenent of the web is the robustness principle: be conservative in what you do and be liberal in what you accept. Graceful fallback to a static image fits that principle.
Exactly. Many formats (PNG, HTML, etc) were designed with that goal in mind. Old browsers are able to skip/ignore any new HTML tags, and old PNG readers know how to skip/ignore new stuff (like APNG chunks) and continue parsing till the end of file.
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Not to mention the entire concept was bonkers. How does turning the web into XML help make browsers less complex? THEY STILL HAVE TO PARSE HTML4! YOU'VE JUST ADDED YET ANOTHER PARSER!
By this logic you can never change any format because "you've just added another parser, you still have to parse [old format]".
If you make a new syntax (and deprecate the old one, which did not happen but could have) you can then structure your code like
if (xhtml) { nice clean parser } else { dirty old code }And you can leave the old code unchanged forever, adding new stuff only on the new one.
And as a bonus, you can delete it and make a smaller, xhtml only browser for internal apps on embedded systems.
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If you make a new syntax (and deprecate the old one, which did not happen but could have) you can then structure your code like
if (xhtml) {
nice clean parser
} else {
dirty old code
}Sounds like what MS ended up doing anyway, just with a few more else ifs.
MP3 - Wikipedia
