Stop JPEG and GIF, start PNG

Warning! This post is either deprecated or outdated.

It’s already clear that we are constantly working on applications for internet, and often those applications or websites use images. Over the years it became an evidence to use png images instead of jpeg or gif. How comes:

Jpeg covers 16.7 million colors and are without any doubt the best for photographic images, but when it comes to website images like buttons, icons, etc, they mostly suck. They are mostly 3 or 4 times the size (kb) of png images, and don’t even think about using shadows or transparency without a background.

Gif is great, without any doubt the most popular on the internet, but they only cover 256 colors, and that’s a huge pain in the ass. When a gradient is in images, you always get these awful lines in the image. The only advantage gif has, is animation.

So why use png?

  • They are 25% more compressed then gif’s (don’t even mention jpeg here)
  • Save, restore and resave will never degrade the quality of the image
  • PNG is recommended by W3C since 1996 (already 12 years ago)

That already should be convincing, isn’t it…

Kenneth

By the way, if you found a typo, please fork and edit this post. Thank you so much! This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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