PNG Released as W3C Recommendation

OCT 01 1996 · 12:00

An under construction GIF, the late nineties aesthetic that PNG inherited a still image solution for while deferring animation to a spec that took two more decades. Place: World Wide Web Consortium, Cambridge, Massachusetts Figures: Thomas Boutell, working group chair · Glenn Randers-Pehrson, libpng author · Greg Roelofs, historian and documentation lead · Jean-loup Gailly, DEFLATE/zlib author PNG 1.0 ships as a W3C Recommendation on 1 October 1996, twenty-one months after the Unisys announcement (see [[unisys-enforcement-1994]]) made it necessary. The technical specification is, by every benchmark that matters, better than GIF: 24-bit true color instead of 8-bit palette, alpha transparency instead of single-bit transparency, DEFLATE compression patent-free instead of LZW, better lossless ratios on most image types. The format is designed by people who watched the Unisys ambush happen and are determined no future image standard will be hostage to a patent. The PNG specification includes explicit prior-art documentation for every algorithmic choice. The W3C process is fast for the era: from comp.graphics draft to Recommendation in twenty-one months.