A spiffy
alternative internet graphics format. It can take 16M colors
(Which GIF can't do, 256 color limit) and maintain
perfect quality (Which
JPEG can't do well, with it's
compression methods).
That's all the common graphics user might care about, but hey, with alpha channels and meta-information, as well as not being a proprietary image format owned by a company who doesn't realize the rules are changing, it's got something for everyone.
One of the few problems with PNG, however, is the horrid filesize on 'noisy' or nonuniform graphics. Photographs, especially, do NOT compress well under PNG. Sure, they maintain perfect quality, but the filesize is inflated to numerous times the size of a JPEG of the same image with somewhere in the range of compression 20. Thus, PNG is far better suited for simple graphics or graphics with relatively 'clean' colors, such as drawings, comics, web widgets, etc. In situations where JPEG's lossy compression isn't noticeable, PNG might suffer.
PNG is the official graphics format of Exclaim Industries. In that it's all I use.
UPDATE!!! I have been informed by blaaf that more recent versions of the GIF image format (Anything past GIF98) CAN, in fact, handle more than an 8-bit color pallette. Hence the strikeout text. Oops.
And now yerricide tells me it's possible to do 16mil color images with GIF89, but... um... I'm not exactly certain his method is 'simple', per se... Still waiting to hear back from him (Honestly, I'm not sure if he's being sarcastic or not)...
Righto, he was serious. Except he described it as more of a hack.