News and History of the PNG Development Group from 1997

Herein lie news items and historical stuff primarily of interest to the Portable Network Graphics Development Group itself. Feel free to poke around even if you're not a member, though. Note that some of the links, particularly the older ones, are broken; in some cases this is explained by later entries. Other links (CompuServe, tcg.arl.mil) have fallen prey to reorganizations or upgrades; should they ever reappear, the entries below will be updated as needed.

Keep in mind that this is history here...

• current - see here

• 31 December 1997 - Draft 42 of the MNG specification is released (more clarifications; no change in technical content).

• 16 November 1997 - Willem van Schaik sets up an Asian mirror site at http://mht3.gintic.gov.sg:8000/pnghome/ .

• 14 November 1997 - Thanks both to Netscape's 4.04 release and to news coverage of it this week (see below), traffic to the PNG home site increased by well over a factor of ten in just four days. As nice as this is, it is also a huge strain on Greg's ISP (and, consequently, on Greg's wallet) ... so the site has moved again. The new (and, we hope, final) URL is http://www.cdrom.com/pub/png/ , provided courtesy of the fine folks at Walnut Creek CD-ROM. At least one and possibly up to three mirror sites will follow shortly.

• 13 November 1997 - Traffic hits 725 megabytes/day.

• 12 November 1997 - Traffic hits 606 megabytes/day.

• 11 November 1997 - Traffic at the PNG home site jumps from around 60 megabytes/day to 335 MB/day.

• 11 November 1997 - PNG is prominently mentioned in this review of Communicator 4.04 by C|Net's Cormac Foster.

• 11 November 1997 - The Big Two finally both support PNG natively! Yes indeedy, with today's release of Netscape Communicator 4.04 with PNG support (except for transparency) and October's release of Internet Explorer 4.0, at least 90% of the browser market (by browser name) now supports PNG. Yowza!

• 1 October 1997 - Lynda Weinman, author of a popular web-design book with a horribly inaccurate section on PNG, writes an article for Web Techniques that clears up a number of the misconceptions. Entitled PNG Pong, the article discusses alpha transparency for both 32-bit and 8-bit images, gamma correction, and Photoshop's less-than-intuitive PNG options.

• 23 September 1997 - Derek Benner reports in comp.lang.pascal.delphi.misc that his book, Learn Graphics File Programming with Delphi 3, has a chapter on reading and writing PNG images. The book is due out in November and includes a CD-ROM with full source code for PNG and other formats. (Note that Eric W. Engler reported in borland.public.delphi.graphics on 4 June 1998 that neither the source code nor the precompiled sample executable actually works with the included sample PNG file. Bart Pelgrims confirmed that there are serious problems with the source code.)

• 19 September 1997 - As promised (see 15 May 1997 below), the first developer release of Apple's Rhapsody OS has native PNG support, according to Clifford Colby's MacWEEK article, Rhapsody heats up: Apple nails down DR1.

• 17 September 1997 - Network Performance Effects of HTTP/1.1, CSS1, and PNG is presented at SIGCOMM '97. (See the 24 June 1997 entry below.)

• 30 June 1997 - Draft 41 of the MNG specification is released (some typos fixed, one new framing mode added).

• 24 June 1997 - Some W3C folks, including the PNG group's own Chris Lilley, expand their WWW6 talk (10 April 1997) into a nice paper entitled Network Performance Effects of HTTP/1.1, CSS1, and PNG. It covers MNG as well as PNG, with emphasis on the bandwidth and time-to-readability aspects of both formats. (PDF and PostScript versions are also available.)

• 16 May 1997 - libpng 0.96 beta (last pre-1.0 version?) is released.

• 15 May 1997 - Apple's upcoming Rhapsody operating system may become the first OS to support PNG natively! Ali Ozer made a comment to that effect with regard to the NSImage AppKit class, as noted in Scott Anguish's report on Day 3 of WWDC'97.

• 9 May 1997 - Greg's PNG overview article, PNG's Not GIF! is the cover story for this week's Web Review.

• 1 May 1997 - Toby Howard points Greg at his May 1997 Personal Computer World article, Things that go PNG on the Web.

• 27 April 1997 - Draft 40 of the MNG specification is released. Glenn declares it essentially finished, pending verification through implementation.

• 22 April 1997 - C|Net reports that Adobe's PostScript Level 3, released today, supports PNG natively as part of its ability to print web pages directly off the web.

• 21 April 1997 - Andrew Zolli, senior technologist at Siegel & Gale, says the following in his article for Netscape's View Source Magazine, Portable Network Graphics: What Every Netscape Developer Needs to Know: "Netscape and Siegel & Gale are working together to embed functionality within a future version of Communicator, so you won't have to use a plug-in to view PNG images [...]" Excellent news!

• 14 April 1997 - Brian McWilliams interviews Chris Lilley and Greg for PC World's News Radio (New Graphics Format Could Make Web Pages Load Faster). The interview is available in both RealAudio and HTML format.

• 8 April 1997 - Support for PNG (and Office 97 formats) is apparently PC Magazine's new standard for "up-to-date" support in file-viewer utilities, at least judging by the repeated references to it in their 1997 Utility Guide.

• 7 April 1997 - libpng 0.95b beta is released.

• 5 April 1997 - Draft 39 of the MNG specification is released.

• 3 April 1997 - Xara's Flare 1.0 Specification is released. This is a PNG-like format for storing vector graphics, but it also supports bitmaps, including PNG images.

• 30 March 1997 - libpng 0.95 beta is released, thanks to the hard work of Andreas Dilger.

• 28 March 1997 - Draft 38 of the MNG specification is released.

• 26 March 1997 - Webmonkey (a.k.a. HotWired) finally gets plugged into a clue as to what PNG is all about. Mary Lukanuski's article, PNG Is the Real Thing is about two years behind the times, but it gets most of its facts correct (only omitting the part about Unisys being the reason for GIF royalties, not CompuServe).

• 14 March 1997 - Ric Foster reports that the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., stores all of its web site's original (electronic) images in PNG format on an optical jukebox. (Many of the images are 20 MB uncompressed.)

• 11 March 1997 - Greg's article on the History of the Portable Network Graphics Format is published in the April issue of Linux Journal.

• 10 March 1997 - Draft 37 of the MNG specification is released.

• 19 February 1997 - Draft 36 of the MNG specification is released.

• 8 February 1997 - Draft 35 of the MNG specification is released.

• 3 February 1997 - The French magazine Décision Micro & Réseaux publishes a factual and positive full-page PNG article entitled Des images de qualité pour graphistes internautes. Marie Gannege is the author.

• 2 February 1997 - An excellent summary of the PNG specification was presented at the Seminar on Telecommunications Technology by Pasi Porkka.

• 1 February 1997 - Glenn Randers-Pehrson's article, MNG: A Multiple-Image Format in the PNG Family, appears in the Winter 1997 issue of the World Wide Web Journal. This issue also has lots of good things to say about PNG, and it contains an interview with Chris Lilley about PNG, MNG, and other matters. (Postscript: An updated version of Glenn's article is available in this directory; look for MNG-status-*.html .)

• 25 January 1997 - Draft 34 of the MNG specification is released.

• 21 January 1997 - Draft 33 of the MNG specification is released.

• 17 January 1997 - libpng 0.90 beta is released.

• 15 January 1997 - The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) finally releases the PNG specification 1.0 as an official Internet RFC (RFC 2083). Wheee!

• 10 January 1997 - Draft 32 of the MNG specification is released.

• 4 January 1997 - Draft 31 of the MNG specification is released.

Here are some related PNG pages at this site:

• Current News of the PNG Development Group
• Historical PNG news:
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• History of PNG
• Current Status of PNG

• PNG Home Page
• Complete PNG Site Map

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