News and History of the PNG Development Group from 2003

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

• 17 November 2003 - zlib 1.2.1 is released. This version improves the speed of inflate by 20% and that of the CRC by 50%, adds a new Z_RLE strategy (especially for PNG/MNG!), fixes some memory leaks and other bugs, improves and updates the documentation, improves portability (of builds), adds some new contrib material, updates the Win32 DLL interface (note: it is binary-incompatible with previous versions), etc. In addition, co-author Mark Adler has now taken over as the principal maintainer of zlib, although Jean-loup still maintains the web site.

• 10 November 2003 - The PNG specification is simultaneously (re)released as the World Wide Web Consortium's PNG (Second Edition) Recommendation and (reportedly) as the International Organization for Standardization and International Electrotechnical Commission's joint International Standard ISO/IEC 15948:2003 (finally!). The latter site doesn't yet show it at stage 60.60 (International Standard published), but we are assured that it is, in fact, there.

• 15 September 2003 - Gregory Wild-Smith writes up a nice comparison of PNG and GIF in his blog. In it he also compares a number of PNG optimizing tools and inadvertently discovers a palette-ordering effect on optimization that resulted in a 3% difference in filesize on his test image. Time to investigate that in more detail...

• 24 July 2003 - The complete text of PNG: The Definitive Guide is now online! Thanks to the fine folks at O'Reilly, who agreed to re-release it under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, the book is once again available. This "second edition" is slightly updated (in particular, some PNG site links and other errata are fixed), but the principal changes are its complete conversion to HTML format and the upgrade of many of its figures to the original, full-resolution, color versions. Enjoy.

• 9 June 2003 - As the expiration date for the (US) Unisys LZW patent draws near, PNG is once again in the news. This CNet article is typical, and it generated the usual enthusiastic response on Slashdot.

• 27 May 2003 - The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announces "PNG Second Edition" as a new Proposed Recommendation. For those who wondered, yes, this is related to the ISO/IEC item (25 April) immediately below.

• 25 April 2003 - The PNG specification reaches stage 60.00 of the ISO/IEC standardization process, International Standard under publication, which is the final stage prior to actual, after-the-fact publication (a.k.a. stage 60.60, International Standard published). Woo hoo! Some of us wondered if this day would ever arrive . . . (Thanks to James Pope for the pointer.)

• 25 April 2003 - Josselin Mouette writes a Debian-specific libpng versioning FAQ on the debian-devel mailing list. It covers some of the issues involving apps that depend on libpng and also on some other library that depends on libpng (e.g., Imlib or GD). With some 10,000 packages under its proverbial belt, Debian is more strongly affected by this issue than most distributions.

• 7 April 2003 - Cosmin Truta writes up a general PNG optimization guide describing the factors that affect PNG compression, strategies to use, and some of the free lossless PNG optimizers (including his own OptiPNG, of course!) that can be used.

• 20 March 2003 - The ISO PNG FDIS ("Final Draft International Standard") ballot is finally underway! Sheesh, Greg can't even recall when the last ISO-related news entry was... There will be a corresponding W3C ballot, but nobody knows how that will be handled since this sort of dual-standardization thing apparently has never been done before. The ISO ballot closes on 7 April, after which there will be some delay and then (hopefully) issuance as a real ISO standard and an updated W3C Recommendation.

• 6 March 2003 - Rich Franzen reports that Google Image Search now supports PNG (and possibly has for quite some time, but no one actually checked recently). For example, try iso-8859 filetype:png, which turns up the 8179-byte iso_8859-1.png image from the PNG Technical Documentation page.

• 6 February 2003 - Andy King's book, Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization, is published. It mainly covers [X]HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the like, and even the Optimizing Web Graphics chapter mainly focuses on JPEG and GIF, but it touches on PNG as well. The web page includes a number of PNG-related links.

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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