All Hail the PNG!

JPEG and GIF reign supreme on the web, there's no doubt about that. But there's a new (old) kid on the block that offers a lot more than the other two and it has been neglected. PNG (Portable Network Graphic) (pronounced ping) has been around for some time now, ever since the lawsuit over the compression scheme with Compuserve.

PNG comes in a couple of flavors, there's the PNG 8-bit and PNG 24-bit formats. The 8-bit version works very much like GIF and is suitable for a wide variety of graphics. The 24-bit version works a lot like JPEG and has the capability of full alpha channel transparency. I've been touting the benefits of PNG with my students for some time now. PNG is the native format for Fireworks and PNG files work exceptionally well in Flash.

Jeff Croft has a great article over at Digital Web Magazine that highlights everything you ever wanted to know about this incredible web graphics file format!