A new PNG spec

>After 20 years of stagnation, PNG is back with renewed vigor!

After 20 years of success, we can't resist the temptation to mess with what works.

Yea I'm mildly concerned about this as well. PNG's age is a feature, in a time where software development has gone to hell.

Without the new HDR and color profile handling, PNG was still useful but significantly obsolete. Display hardware has progressed over a few decades, raising the bar for image files.

There is nothing in display hardware today that TIFF couldn't handle already.

For example 16bit (integer) TIFF files 'with headroom', i.e. where some bits were used to represent data over 1.0 (HDR) was a common approach for VFX work in the 90's.

16bit float TIFF is also thing since 33 years. Adobe DNG is modeled after TIFF. High end offline renderers have traditionally been using TIFF (with mip-maps) to store textures.

TIFF supports tags so primaries and white point or a known color space name can be stored in the file.

The format is so versatile, it is used everywhere.

And of course it also supports indexed color, i.e. a non-negotiable feature at the time PNG was introduced.

PNG was meant to replace GIF. Instead of looking what was already there some group of "experts" and "enthusiasts" (quote Wikipedia) succumbed to their NIH complexes. If licensing/patent woes over compression algorithms had been a motivator, why not just add a new one to TIFF?

The fact that PNG stores straight/unpremultiplied alpha says everything if you know anything about imaging in computer graphics.

And the fact that the updated format spec just released didn't address this tells you everything you need to know about the group in charge of that, today.

PNG is the VHS of image formats. It should have never seen the light day of in the first place nor the adoption it did.