News and History of the PNG Development Group from 2000

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

• 19 September 2000 - Sun releases version 1.0a of the Java2 Micro Edition Mobile Information Device Profile (J2ME MIDP), a Java profile for cell phones and similar devices. PNG support is required, you betcha! (Although not transparency support, alas...)

• 6 September 2000 - David Lehn and Hadley Stern, a couple of design folks at Razorfish, write a nice article for Webmonkey that hopefully will debunk, once and for all, Lynda Weinman's "web safe" palette as anything but safe. Death of the Websafe Color Palette? contains several technical inaccuracies (e.g., "the 15-bit and 16-bit palettes are not subsets of the 24-bit palette"--ouch!), and its conclusion is perhaps too optimistic, but its overall message--that the so-called "web safe" palette isn't--is right on the mark.

• 4 August 2000 - PC Magazine rates PNG number 4 on the list of Internet Technologies to Watch. The story also appears on page 145 of the 1 September 2000 issue of the US printed version. (Note, however, that PNG is "an alternative to JPEG" only in the sense of being complementary; see the basic introduction page for tips on where PNG makes more sense and where JPEG does.) Thanks to Michael Broschat for the pointer!

• 26 July 2000 - pngcrush, Glenn's PNG optimizer, not only breaks the top 40 in the list of downloads at SourceForge but does so at number 30. Way to go, Glenn! (And PNG, of course.)

• 24 July 2000 - libpng 1.0.8 is released. This version adds support for Cygwin and WinCE DLLs, improves the GNU C MMX support, and fixes a minor memory leak in progressive reading.

• 12 July 2000 - Version 1.1.1 of the Multimedia Home Platform standard, ETSI TS 101 812 V1.1.1 (2000-07), is published by the ETSI telecom standards organization. The standard specifies PNG as one of its image formats.

• 1 July 2000 - libpng 1.0.7 is released. This version fixes some memory-allocation bugs, changes the locations of some internal struct members to restore binary compatibility with 1.0.5 and earlier, adds a work-around for a bug in Photoshop 5.5's iCCP chunks, and adds support for Windows DLL builds.

• 27 June 2000 - Greg's article, PNG, MNG, JNG and Mozilla M17, appears on Slashdot. Alas, the M17 part is slightly premature. An updated and corrected version is available locally.

• 27 May 2000 - PNG "decide[s] the fate of the global Internet economy!" Or so says Wired. Check out their article, India Eyes Role in Net Regs, for details. So much for the W3C and XML... PNG rules!

• 16 May 2000 - SinDominio publishes an article (in Spanish) by `Lupus Yonderboy' entitled, Si los GIFs te queman, quema los GIFs (loosely, "If the GIFs burn you, burn all GIFs"). Of course, PNG is most excellently espoused as the logical alternative, you betcha.

• 8 May 2000 - PNG finally achieves parity (sort of) with JPEG and GIF in Java 2 Standard Edition (`J2SE') 1.3. According to the new features page, "PNG images are loaded and drawn the same way as GIF and JPEG images in the Java 2D API." Took a while, but at least it's progress...

• 3 May 2000 - The PNG home site moves for what should be the last time, thanks to a new libpng.org domain that can be redirected at will if the underlying host site should ever change again. The new URLs are:
  • http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/
  • ftp://ftp.libpng.org/pub/png/png.html
  For now, the http and ftp sites are hosted on the same machine, so the content is identical. (Note that the MNG and zlib home sites also moved.)

• 25 April 2000 - Mark K. Anderson's article, The Latest GIF Tiff, is published in The Industry Standard and subsequently picked up (in abridged form) by PC World. It covers much the same ground as Evan Hansen's CNET article (see the 18 April 2000 entry) but with a stronger anti-software-patent angle provided by Don Marti.

• 24 April 2000 - Peter Coffee's column, Some attention to image size would speed Web `sights', is published in PC Week. He makes a much-needed plea to Web developers, both professional and amateur, to pay attention to the size of the web content they're creating and to minimize that size wherever possible--especially when it comes to images. He also comments on PNG's strengths in interlacing and alpha transparency (particularly for anti-aliasing), and [blush] he says nice things about Greg's book, too. [Note: as of mid-2004, PC Week has been renamed eWEEK, and Peter Coffee's columns are no longer available.]

• 24 April 2000 - Gerard Juyn sets up a PNG and MNG mirror site in the Netherlands:
  • http://www.libmng.com/pub/png/
  • http://www.libmng.com/pub/mng/
  Not only that, the top-level page will be the home of the MNG library he's writing. You da man, Gerard!

• 18 April 2000 - Evan Hansen's article, Patent demands may spur Unisys rivals in graphics market, is published on CNET. It covers the continuing Unisys/LZW saga (see PNG news from 1999), but it includes some interesting new information on the size of Unisys's license demands. Unfortunately, the concurrent news about full alpha-transparency support in several recent browser releases--Mac IE 5.0, iCab 1.9, Mozilla 2000-04-14, and NetPositive 2.2--got a bit muddled in the translation from phone interview to text. But the article was well-received by the Slashdot crowd, with a notably lower quotient of clue-challenged comments than the last such posting generated.

• 5 April 2000 - A third patch for libpng 1.0.6 ("c") is released. It restores backward compatibility with regard to libpng's freeing of text info (which was briefly incompatible with previous libpng releases). It also replaces the use of strdup(), which does not exist on some platforms.

• 28 March 2000 - A second patch for libpng 1.0.6 ("b") is released. This one-liner fixes a problem in the (non-default) fixed-point RGB-to-grayscale conversion routine.

• 27 March 2000 - Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 for Macintosh is finally released (well over a year after the Windows release...). It is the first major browser with what appears to be complete and perfect PNG support. Greg is most impressed! Check out the screen shots (especially if you're the developer of another browser!).

• 25 March 2000 - A patch for libpng 1.0.6 ("a") is released. It is required for programs that intend to support the iCCP chunk (ICC profiles, not previously supported by libpng) or that use a non-STDIO version of libpng (i.e., not the usual version).

• 20 March 2000 - libpng 1.0.6 is released. This version adds a functional (but incomplete) GNU C port of the x86/MMX assembler code, a new pngminus demo app, the latest release of Willem van Schaik's PNG Suite images, a new png_jmpbuf() macro to help programmers migrate to the next major release, and support for the iTXt, iCCP, sPLT and sCAL chunks and for unknown chunks. The older gregbook demo apps have also been updated, bugs have been fixed, and a number of new makefiles have been added.

• 17 March 2000 - Guan Yang has set up another mirror for both the PNG and MNG home sites:
  • http://png.unicast.org/pub/png/ and ftp://png.unicast.org/pub/png/
  • http://png.unicast.org/pub/mng/ and ftp://png.unicast.org/pub/mng/
  The new site is in Copenhagen, Denmark. Hats off to Guan!

• 14 March 2000 - The PNG home site is Six-Packed (a weekly showcase of half a dozen sites hosted by Pat Cashin). Thanks!

• 7 March 2000 - Greg gives a talk on graphics, PNG, MNG, Mozilla, and related topics at a meeting of the Linux User Group of Davis. Some photos are available at the LUGOD site (and no, Greg did not hold his book for more than the 30 seconds or so it took to take those pictures). The presentation itself is also available.

• 2 February 2000 - Anthony Celeste's article The Future Of Web Design - Part I is published at Corel's designer.com. It covers JPEG 2000 and PNG ("the underappreciated format"), and Greg even squeezed in a couple of quotes. The second part of the article will cover MNG and SVG.

• 18 January 2000 - Version 1.0 of the 500-page HAVi Specification (Home Audio/Video Interoperability, an IEEE-1394 and Java-based home-networking standard for consumer electronics) is published. It includes PNG as one of its mandatory content types for embedded bitmaps (the other one being "HAVi raw bitmap," which is actually an uncompressed variant of PNG that has a HAVi-specific file signature and uses "RdAT" chunks instead of IDATs). Only colormapped PNGs are allowed, and while the spec does no explicitly mention the tRNS chunk, it does refer to the possibility of PNG pixels with alpha values in the section on visual composition.

• 2 January 2000 - Michael J. Hammel's very nice review of PNG: The Definitive Guide appears in the January 2000 issue of Linux Journal.

Here are some related PNG pages at this site:

• Current News of the PNG Development Group
• Historical PNG news:
  • 2013 · 2012 · 2011 · 2010 · 2009 · 2008 · 2007 · 2006 · 2005 · 2004 · 2003 · 2002 · 2001 · 2000 · 1999 · 1998 · 1997 · 1996 · 1995
• History of PNG
• Current Status of PNG

• PNG Home Page
• Complete PNG Site Map

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