Sadly, Randers-Pehrson died in 2018 but these images are still readable today. This image is one of the so-called "paleo PNGs," considered the first to be successfully encoded into this new image file format and uploaded to the internet. Taken by long-time PNG contributor Glenn Randers-Pehrson, it features an opossum aptly named PNG who frequented his family's deck in search of cat food. This website, part of a larger project in collaboration with Black Rock Press, is an annotated version of the image above. Today, nearly 70% of all websites have at least one PNG image on them. The first working draft was passed by WC3 at the fourth International By 1997 it was widely supported by Microsoft Office, Photoshop and Illustrator, Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Only a day after the first post, a working draft of the file format was published by Boutell this version of PNG looks very much like the format we have today. PNG, as it would eventually be called, was originally known by a variety of names, including Peanut Butter Format (aka "Chunky GIF") and the recursive dig PNG's Not GIF. Many of the early discussions still archived in aphics. JPG had existed at this time for a couple of years, but its compression was lossy, meaning the image could not be reconstructed at full resolution the way GIF or TIFF (another popular format at the time) allowed.Īfter Boutell's original post, a " group of strangers" formed, working entirely online and by consensus (though with Boutell as the "Benevolent Dictator," a role inspired by Linus Torvalds' work leading the development of the Linux kernel). This created a huge stir among online communities, notably the aphics newsgroup, where the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format would later have its start.īut amid days of complaints and arguments, on 3 January 1995 Thomas Boutell made a post suggesting that a new image file format be created, one that used technologies that were free of any patents. Three days before Christmas of 1994, a deal was announced where CompuServe would charge royalties to any software that supported GIFs. But, though popular, the GIF format was quietly embroiled in a year-long legal battle over the data compression technique it used called LZW. The internet was shifting from primarily a text-based experience to one full of media, in particular GIFs, an image format introduced by CompuServe in the late 1980s. In 1994, the internet was in an early heyday AOL had about three million active users with lots of other folks participating in other online platforms. Annotated Guide to Opossum.png A PNG file created by Glenn Randers-Pehrson Annotated by Jeff Thompson
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