(Apparently managed to miss the list with my reply. Whoops.)

On Wed, 2008-09-17 at 07:35 -0500, James Bursa wrote:
> On Wednesday 17 September 2008, you wrote:
> > On Tue, 2008-09-16 at 19:26 -0500, James Bursa wrote:
> > > In summary I don't see where the enthusiasm for disabling a fully working
> > > and useful feature is coming from.
> > Because MNG is obsolete in favour of APNG, which has actually been
> > implemented in browsers that more than a rounding error's worth of
> > people use?
> > 
> > There's no legacy base of websites that'd stop working if it were
> > removed, as nobody used it in the first place, so it's a great
> > candidate for culling. (Ergo: not actually a "useful feature".)
> It is not that simple, for example:
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.graphics.png.general/1688/

I'm aware of that, but it ultimately doesn't matter. Mildly popular
browsers have implemented APNG, and not MNG (to the extent of removing
it from Mozilla), so APNG stands infinitely more chance of being used
than MNG.

It may also avoid MNG's stillbirth by degrading gracefully in IE.

> Please don't call NetSurf a rounding error.

My point is that the sum of MNG-supporting browser share is < 1%,
without pegging any actual number on it, thus nobody is ever going to
use it. This makes it dead weight, which is bad for the reasons Rob
highlights. As for libpng vs libmng, AFAIK, libpng has patches for APNG
support; libmng does not.

-- 
| Philip Boulain   PhD student | The world can  only really be changed |
| IAM, ECS, Uni of Southampton | one  piece  at  a time.  The  art  is |
| http://zepler.net/~lionsphil | picking that piece. --Tim Berners-Lee |



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