News and History of the PNG Development Group from 2001

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

• 13 December 2001 - libpng 1.2.1 is released. This version is purely a bugfix release; it fixes a bug in the MMX-detection code, allocates 256-entry internal palette buffers in all cases to guard against images with out-of-bounds palette indices, and updates some of the makefiles.

• 25 November 2001 - The ever-amusing Vince Sabio has kindly registered and set up three easy-to-remember domains that point directly at the PNG home site (as opposed to the top-level libpng.org page):
  • http://www.pngformat.org/
  • http://www.pngformat.com/
  • http://www.pngformat.net/
  It's possible that the third (.net) will go away eventually, but the other two are expected to be long-lived. (Greg will probably take over if Vince ever gets tired of paying for them.) Thanks!

• 21 November 2001 - A bit of fuss surrounding a certain Apple patent on alpha masks--and how it may or may not relate to PNG--finally appears to be dying down. Broadly speaking, the trigger was the W3C's months-old patent-policy RFC. But the current dust-up appears to have been set off by a Slashdot posting by Daniel E. Maddux, who found Glenn Randers-Pehrson's alpha-patent page and wanted to help publicize Glenn's quest for more prior art. (Unfortunately, the title he chose for the posting, Apple Patent Blocking PNG Development, casts the issue in an entirely different light.) Tony Smith then wrote a corresponding Register article, which in turn was picked up by Linux Today. That was the article Greg first noticed, and he tried to clarify a few points and possibly defuse the general hysteria with a "talkback" posting. But perhaps not surprisingly, that led to a new round of excitement with an OS Opinion article by Kelly McNeill, its obligatory follow-up Slashdot coverage, and a final(?) bit of commentary by Greg. Alas, the damage is already done; PNG is now seen as "tainted" by some less-technical readers, and at least a few believe (incorrectly!) that Apple has actually filed a lawsuit. Sigh. Greg will be updating the FAQ page shortly . . .

• 23 October 2001 - Stefan Mayrhofer sets up a web-based PNG/MNG-specific discussion area at http://pub33.ezboard.com/blibpng. It includes forums for software development, browsers, PNG web sites, MNG/JNG, and so forth. [WARNING: This site employs "pop-under" ads. Disable JavaScript if you find them offensive.]

• 20 October 2001 - Bob Friesenhahn sets up a mirror of the swrinde ftp site at ftp://ftp.simplesystems.org/pub/libpng/ .

• 1 September 2001 - libpng 1.2.0 is released. This version adds runtime support for enabling or disabling the MMX routines (and eventually other optimizations), adds checks for invalid bKGD and tRNS values, extends do_invert_mono(), fixes a crash bug in the rpng/rpng2 demo programs, and cleans up various other little things. It also bumps the DLL and shared-library version number to 3 to avoid various compatibility problems with the new and modified interfaces.

• 31 July 2001 - We're back! As many of you noticed, the most recent host site for libpng.org (FreeSoftware.com) has been pretty flaky since March or April, with no network connectivity for days or weeks at a time, and no ftp service whatsoever. So this weekend, Greg undertook to move the entire PNG site to a new host, SourceForge, and as of today, that move is mostly complete. Thanks to last year's foresight (see the 3 May 2000 news item) and SourceForge's most excellent virtual hosting, all of your old PNG and MNG links will once again work automagically:
  • http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/
  • http://www.libpng.org/pub/mng/
  Well...almost. Greg still has to figure out what's up with ftp access, which is important for mirroring, but we're close... SourceForge also supports rsync, but Greg doesn't know much about that yet, either.

• 8 June 2001 - libpng 1.0.12 is released. This version adds a new Netware port (project files distributed separately), splits out the WinCE project files into a separate archive, and improves backward compatibility with extremely old applications by internally reallocating the PNG structs if deprecated APIs are used.

• 1 June 2001 - Kevin Savetz's article, The Care and Feeding of PNG, is published in the June issue of Web Techniques. It includes a few quotes from Greg, so modesty prohibits his usual gushing review. It does read very nicely, however, and it touches on many (most?) of the issues that will matter to site designers considering how and when to use PNG images. (Read it! Read it! Read it!)

• 27 April 2001 - libpng 1.0.11 is released. This version fixes various small bugs and warnings and adds a makefile for NetBSD.

• 2 April 2001 - Danielle Moore's article, Internet Explorer 5 and Open Internet Standards: A Beginner's Guide covers PNG in a positive sort of way and even includes a link to O'Reilly's page for PNG: The Definitive Guide. Excellent. But what's remarkable about this is that it appears on Microsoft's site! Ah, but wait: it's in the Mac section, and, of course, Internet Explorer for Macintosh has had outstanding PNG support since version 5.0 was released. Now if only the Windows developers would get off their thumbs...

• 2 April 2001 - libpng garners a five-star rating at AppWatch. Let's hope that's out of five, eh?

• 30 March 2001 - libpng 1.0.10 is released. This version fixes a buffer-overrun bug in the non-MMX portion of the MMX-enabled code (both MSVC and GNU C versions), fixes a memory leak in the VisuPng contributed program, fixes progressive handling of images less than 8 pixels wide, and cleans up assorted other things.

• 16 March 2001 - Ubersoft.net's Help Desk comic begins a lengthy thread about PNG, leading to the total conversion of the site to PNG format on 21 March. (Greg knew his ancestry included some Russians; he just didn't realize it happened while he was in grad school.) Groovy.

• 31 January 2001 - libpng 1.0.9 is released. This version updates the gcc/gas MMX support to a level comparable to the MSVC version, adds Borland project files and a few MNG-related functions (not enabled by default in 1.0.9), fixes some bugs in iCCP support and adds a workaround for broken Photoshop 5.5 iCCP chunks, and fixes a few other little bugs and documentation errors. This is likely to be the last of the 1.0 series; the next release is expected to be 1.2.0 and will include a whole new class of runtime-tunable functions.

• 16 January 2001 - Cosmin Truta releases a first cut at an EBNF grammar for PNG, MNG and JNG. (That would be an "Extended Backus-Naur Form," for those of us who are somewhat less clue-enhanced.)

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
• Current Status of PNG

• PNG Home Page
• Complete PNG Site Map

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