The PNG Portable Network Graphics file format specification took a step towards replacing GIF last week as it received the endorsement of the World Wide Web Consortium. PNG had been championed by CompuServe Inc as an alternative to the GIF24 specification it had been working on to avoid paying royalties to Unisys Corp for its patent on GIF’s LZW compression technology. Other than non-patented compression, PNG boasts automatic gamma correction across systems – which means colors look right what ever operating system is used – smaller, faster-loading files, indexed-color, greyscale and true-color image support. PNG files can also contain keywords and text strings so that a search engine could be used to find a PNG file with a specific keyword. Details at the site: http://www. w3.org/pub/WWW/Graphics/PNG/Overview.html
