APNG Update

In a public (experimental) release, following the initial alpha release, Opera 9.5 added support for APNG. Animated PNG is a small extension on top of PNG that, surprise, enables animation. Alpha transparency and a lot more colors is of course the big advantage here. Demo pages: 1, 2 and 3. APNG Editor add-on for Firefox. The format is quite trivial to support and doesn’t increase the footprint as much as MNG. Another advantage is that it has fallback support so the image does not become completely unusable in browsers that don’t support APNG yet, such as Safari, Internet Explorer and older versions of Opera and Firefox.

The main disadvantage of APNG seems to be that it is currently not a standard. The PNG Group rejected the proposal. Apparently turning PNG into an animation format besides handling still images was not considered to be a good idea. It would need to have a separate media type and all that which kind of defeats the purpose of the format as proposed. There are several counterproposals and there is a page comparing them. Hopefully everyone can draw their own conclusions out of that data.

Also, avoid using pngcrush on APNG files. Use svg2png to convert animated SVG to APNG. That’s it, I think.

Copyright © 2003-2020 Anne van Kesteren