![[PNG icon]](img_png/pnglogo-blk-tiny.gif)
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; if and when they reappear, the entries below
will be updated as needed.
Keep in mind that this is history here...
- 1998 and later - 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!
- 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.
- 30 June 1997 - Draft 41 of the MNG specification is released
(some typos fixed, one new framing mode added).
- 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!
(also non-frames version) 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. (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.
- 1996 - see here
- 1995 - see here
Here are the other PNG-related pages at this site:
Last modified 29 August 1998
by newt@pobox.com , you betcha.
Copyright © 1995-1998 Greg Roelofs.
![[PNG icon]](img_png/png-tiny.gif){kind=small}
Introduction to PNG features