On the roadmap there are plans for PDF, Visio etc. formats support, but GIF is still not supported... Why? If it was the case of patents, these have already expired AFAIK...

I suspect it's for the same reason that it doesn't yet support saving as JPG - nobody has got around to coding it, perhaps because it's not a priority over other features.

GIF won't bring anything new to the table. PNG can do everything GIF can and a lot more. Additionally PNG¹ is usually a lot smaller than GIF. The exceptions are really tiny images (such as 1x16 fills) and a few special cases.

Speaking of which... I'm currently working on some PNG compression article. I hope I can finish it this evening.

[¹ I mean indexed PNG with bitmask transparency here. Otherwise the comparison wouldn't be fair, because 32bit PNGs contain a lot more data obviously. BTW even IE5 can handle that kind of GIF-alike PNGs.]

PNG transparency generally is not working on IE thus this is a no-go for website graphic developers. We had a lot of problems with that. GIF support is needed for compatibility in such cases.

Guest wrote:PNG transparency generally is not working on IE thus this is a no-go for website graphic developers. We had a lot of problems with that. GIF support is needed for compatibility in such cases.

IE5, 5.5 and 6 can render opaque PNGs and indexed PNGs. With indexed PNGs every color with a tRNS entry is rendered as fully translucent, which is a bit unfortunate. However, if there is only one fully transparent entry it works fine (feature wise it's identical to GIF... just better compressed).

32bit PNGs are also displayed. However, it's blended against the bKGD color (can be changed with tweakpng), which defaults to medium (=50%) gray. There are filter workarounds for that, but I would stay clear of em.

IE7 fully supports PNG. You can finally use 32bit or quantized PNGs there. However, the gAMA chunk is still interpreted... so, you should really strip it, if it's set. PNGOUT for example does this automatically. Running with PNGOUT over your files is a good idea anyways, because it can reduce the file size drastically.

A good solution are conditional statements. IE < 7 gets indexed stuff and every other browser gets the nicer ones.