> In the case of GIF versus JPG, which are usually regarded as "lossless" > versus "lossy", please note that there /is/ no "orignal", in the sense > of a stream of bytes. Why not? Because an image is not a stream of > bytes. Period.
GIF isn't a compression scheme; it uses the LZW compression scheme, like Unix compress, which is a stream of bytes compressor. Also, if I take my data and encoded it as bytes and stick it into a GIF file with an arbitrary palette, I can get back exactly that data. But if I encode my data as 9 bit chunks and interprete those as Unicode character points (9 bits, because 10 bits would get us undefined code points and 16 would get us surrogate code points), and I emailed it to someone, and the mailer automatically compressed it, I wouldn't consider it lossless if it wouldn't decompress at the other side. And enough stuff in the real world will barf on combining characters, or at least perform suboptimally, that changing the normalization scheme could really cause problems. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm
