Clarence wrote:
> What if we put together a little package that visitors to ZBM laden pages
> might download to "upgrade" their browsers ?
>
> Before we get into the nitty gritty of how to accomplish this upgrade,
> particularly for Netscape, let's see how hopeless you feel the idea is.<G>
Yep, hopeless for non-Arachne users. Why would they want the clutter
of ZBM and BMP (particularly the latter)? Most browsers are useless at
saving pages with images, so I guess most users (are forced to) regard
images as ephemeral content, unless they explicitly want to save it.
A site owner with images deserving the best quality on the end user's
machine should offer PNG and/or ZBM alternatives. For my own archiving
of images to be offered as JPEGs I use PNG. Making `em is slower than
zipping, but at least I can open `em right there in a graphics app, and
fit more on a floppy.
As well as being slow, PNG file-sizes aren't particularly inspiring,
and ZBM is best suited to images with large same-color areas. Even then,
a 16-color GIF is competitive and quicker and easier to produce for
e.g. scans of correspondence. (Not talking about batch processing here.)
This issue reminds me of people trying to re-invent the bicycle. Sure,
you can come up with improvements in specific areas, but the diamond
frame is the best solution overall, even though the only graphite
Great-Grandpa had was in his pencil.
Regards,
Jake
p.s. Animated PNGs _are_ available.
p.p.s. Representative figures for a 360x240 pixel photo:
BMP 253kB
ZBM 215kB
PNG 196kB
JPEG 25kB
