News and History of the PNG Development Group from 1996

Herein lie news items and historical stuff primarily of interest to the Portable Network Graphics Development Group itself. Feel free to poke around even if you're not a member, though. Note that some of the links, particularly the older ones, are broken; in some cases this is explained by later entries. Other links (CompuServe, tcg.arl.mil) have fallen prey to reorganizations or upgrades; should they ever reappear, the entries below will be updated as needed.

Keep in mind that this is history here...

• current - see here

• 31 December 1996 - The PNG home pages have now moved to an even shorter URL, http://www.wco.com/~png/ . (This page, for example, can now be referenced as http://www.wco.com/~png/pngnews.html). The zlib home pages have also moved: http://www.cdrom.com/pub/infozip/zlib/ . The old site should have redirects in place so that everything is transparent. (Big thanks to Mark Adler for hosting the PNG pages until now!)

• 31 December 1996 - Draft 30 of the MNG specification is released.

• 30 December 1996 - Draft 29 of the MNG specification is released.

• 19 December 1996 - Draft 28 of the MNG specification is released.

• 12 December 1996 - Draft 27 of the MNG specification is released.

• 7 December 1996 - Draft 26 of the MNG specification is released.

• 22 November 1996 - Draft 25 of the MNG specification is released.

• 15 November 1996 - Michael Battilana updates his article on the GIF/LZW controversy with information on Unisys's new LZW licensing restrictions.

• 15 November 1996 - Draft 24 of the MNG specification is released.

• 15 November 1996 - adobe.mag publishes an article on the history of PNG (PDF format only) by J. Scott Hamlin. (See the Past Articles archive for a brief synopsis.)

• 11 November 1996 - MacWeek publishes an article on PNG by Jeff Eaton. One interesting tidbit is that Netscape is still waffling more than any five Eggo commercials... Sigh.

• 8 November 1996 - Draft 23 of the MNG specification is released.

• 1 November 1996 - Draft 22 of the MNG specification is released.

• October 1996 - The McGraw-Hill World Wide Web Training Manual, by Ron Wagner, is published with PNG excerpts taken from these very web pages.

• 25 October 1996 - Draft 21 of the MNG specification is released.

• 14 October 1996 - The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) formally approves image/png as an Internet Media Type. Can the official RFC issuance be far behind? (See also the 11 July 1996 and 30 May 1996 entries below.)

• 7 October 1996 - Draft 20 of the MNG specification is released.

• 7 October 1996 - More press coverage on PNG: Investor's Business Daily and Computerworld.

• 4 October 1996 - Draft 19 of the MNG specification is released.

• 1 October 1996 - PNG is announced as the W3C's first official Recommendation in this press release. The endorsement is the subject of a mostly accurate news item by C|Net's Tim Clark. The PNG group's own Chris Lilley is prominently quoted (from a 2am interview), you betcha.

• 30 September 1996 - Draft 18 of the MNG specification is released.

• 28 September 1996 - Draft 17 of the MNG specification is released.

• 14 September 1996 - Draft 16 of the MNG specification is released.

• 7 September 1996 - Draft 15 of the MNG specification is released.

• 2 September 1996 - Draft 14 of the MNG specification is released.

• 28 August 1996 - Draft 13 of the MNG specification is released.

• 24 August 1996 - Draft 12 of the MNG specification, formerly known as "PNF," is released. (MNG stands for Multiple-image Network Graphics and is the PNG-based animation format.)

• 16 August 1996 - Draft 11 of the PNF specification is released.

• 13 August 1996 - Draft 10 of the PNF specification is released.

• 10 August 1996 - Draft 9 of the PNF specification is released.

• 4 August 1996 - The Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) 2.0 specification is released, and PNG is one of two image formats required for conformance. (JPEG is the other.) So there.

• 27 July 1996 - Draft 8 of the PNF specification is released.

• 24 July 1996 - zlib 1.0.4 is released. This version fixes a rare bug wherein the decoder could continue "decoding" garbage beyond the end of the true compressed data.

• 20 July 1996 - Draft 7 of the PNF specification is released.

• 11 July 1996 - Draft 6 of the PNF specification is released.

• 11 July 1996 - The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) approves the PNG Specification 1.0 as an official Informational RFC.

• 5 July 1996 - Draft 5 of the PNF specification is released.

• 3 July 1996 - zlib 1.0.3 is released.

• 2 July 1996 - Draft 4 of the PNF specification is released.

• 1 July 1996 - The W3C promotes the PNG specification from Working Draft status to Proposed Recommendation. Final disposition is to be announced by 14 September 1996.

• 28 June 1996 - Draft 3 of the PNF specification is released.

• 26 June 1996 - Draft 2 of the PNF specification is released.

• 25 June 1996 - Glenn Randers-Pehrson releases Draft 1 of the PNF specification ("Portable Network Frame"). This describes how multiple sub-images can be placed to create a single frame and is intended to be the foundation for MNG, the Multiple-image Network Graphics format (i.e., the follow-on to PNG that supports animations).

• 17 June 1996 - libpng 0.89 beta is released by Andreas Dilger in the absence of Guy, who appears to have vanished into the hyperspace continuum.

• 30 May 1996 - Tom Lane, final editor of the PNG spec, declares, "The PNG Spec Is Done." It still has "Draft" boilerplate at the top and will have "0.98" in the filename until the W3C and IETF folks finish whatever it is they do, but this is the PNG 1.0 specification. After the W3C Tech Report and IETF RFC are released, the filenames will also be updated to refer to "1.0." (Official IANA image/png status should occur at that time as well.)

• 23 May 1996 - zlib 1.0.2 is released. This version includes Windows DLL and Unix shared-library support, DOS medium-memory-model support, and generally all the little odds and ends that have been on the to-do list. In other words, this is the one to get, and don't expect another release for a while.

• 22 May 1996 - The specifications for zlib, the deflate algorithm and gzip are all released as official Internet RFCs (numbers 1950, 1951 and 1952, respectively). Nice work, guys.

• 21 May 1996 - zlib 1.0.1 (not a beta!) is released. (1.0 was skipped due to some premature `1.0' references in beta version 0.99.)

• 24 April 1996 - The top three image viewers on Stroud's Win95 Graphics Viewers page all support PNG and got 4 1/2 stars each; program number four only got 4 stars, and its review listed lack of PNG support as one of its cons(!). There ya go: PNG support is all you need to be a winner.

• 19 April 1996 - The primary European mirror site at the University of Manchester, formerly maintained by Chris Lilley, is dying. The mirroring software broke silently several months ago (without being noticed), and Chris has recently moved on to a new job. The good news is that Dave Beckett still maintains an alternate UK mirror site at HENSA; see 20 December 1995 below for details.

• 3 April 1996 - The first PNG baby (see 24 October 1995 below) repeatedly tries to grab some rendered balls off of Dad's PNG T-shirt. Oy, will the cuteness never cease?

• 15 March 1996 - An old revision of the PNG spec, draft 10 (see 5 May 1995 below) is given a three-star rating (out of four; represents 22-27 points out of 30) by Magellan. [Enter "PNG" in Magellan's search field. The URL changes every day, apparently.]

• 11 March 1996 - Version 0.96 of the PNG specification is released. Aside from the image/png registry issue, this thing is done. Consider this to be effectively the 1.0 specification.

• 24 February 1996 - PNG on TV! CSPAN-2 broadcasts a one-hour talk by Tim Berners-Lee on the future of the WWW (from a conference at the JFK School of Government on 6 February), and PNG is mentioned several times. Unfortunately, Greg doesn't get CSPAN-2...

• 23 February 1996 - The PNG specification (version 0.95) is released as an Internet Draft by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). (See the PNG docs page for up-to-date pointers.)

• 19 February 1996 - The zlib Home Page is ready to rock.

• 14 February 1996 - Vince Sabio of the Army Research Laboratory writes a review of PNG for the Adobe Photoshop mailing list. See also his related Compression Primer.

• 12 February 1996 - The March 1996 issue of the Linux Journal arrives with a reasonably accurate article on graphics formats, including PNG.

• 29 January 1996 - zlib 0.99 beta is released.

• 26 January 1996 - libpng 0.88 beta is released.

• 16 January 1996 - libpng 0.87 beta is released, virtually complete in all respects except for improved dithering support.

• 10 January 1996 - libpng 0.86 beta is released with push-model support at last (although Greg always thought it was pull-model...).

Here are some related PNG pages at this site:

• Current News of the PNG Development Group
• Historical PNG news:
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• History of PNG
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• PNG Home Page
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