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A new PNG spec

(www.programmax.net)
614 points bluedel | 8 comments | 24 Jun 25 13:01 UTC | HN request time: 1.177s | source | bottom
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albert_e ◴[25 Jun 25 05:09 UTC] No.44373786[source]▶
So animated GIFs can be replaced by Animated PNGs with alpha blending with transparent backgrounds and lossless compression! Some nostalgia from 2000s websites can be revived and relived :)

Curious if Animated SVGs are also a thing. I remember seeing some Javascript based SVG animations (it was a animated chatbot avatar) - but not sure if there is any standard framework.

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riffraff ◴[25 Jun 25 05:22 UTC] No.44373868[source]▶
I was under the impression many gifs these days are actually served as soundless videos, as those basically compress better.

Can animated PNG beat av1 or whatever?

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1. bawolff ◴[25 Jun 25 10:18 UTC] No.44375571[source]▶
Its also because people like to "pause" animations, and that is not really an option with apng & gif.
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2. bigfishrunning ◴[25 Jun 25 14:48 UTC] No.44377985[source]▶
why not? that's up to the program displaying the animation, not the animation itself -- i'm sure a pausable gif or apng display program is possible
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3. pornel ◴[25 Jun 25 15:19 UTC] No.44378333[source]▶
It's absolutely possible. Browsers even routinely pause playback when images aren't visible on screen.

They just don't have a proper UI and JS APIs exposed, and there's nothing stopping them from adding that.

IMO browsers are just stuck with tech debt, and maintainin a no-longer-relevant distinction between "animations" and "videos". Every supported codec should work wherever GIF/APNG work and vice versa.

It's not even a performance or complexity issue, e.g. browsers support AVIF "animations" as images, even though they're literally fully-featured AV1 videos, only wrapped in a "pretend I'm an image" metadata.

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4. joquarky ◴[25 Jun 25 17:02 UTC] No.44379530{3}[source]▶
I wish browsers still paused all animations when the user hits the Esc key. It's hard to read when there are distracting animations all over most pages.
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5. nextaccountic ◴[25 Jun 25 17:20 UTC] No.44379733{3}[source]▶
> They just don't have a proper UI and JS APIs exposed, and there's nothing stopping them from adding that.

Browsers should just allow animated gifs and apngs in <video>

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6. account42 ◴[26 Jun 25 09:29 UTC] No.44385668[source]▶
Browsers used to support pausing GIFs by pressing the escape key.
7. account42 ◴[26 Jun 25 09:36 UTC] No.44385700{4}[source]▶
More important would be to allow (silent) videos in <img>.
8. ◴[26 Jun 25 09:38 UTC] No.44385708{4}[source]▶