Imagine the documentation had they gone with Tim Berners-Lee suggestion in using the ‘<A>’ tag for images. We would be living in a slightly more frustrating world…
JPEG’s first public release was Sep 1992 making it extremely new, and PNG was sometime in 1995, so not invented yet. The only other offering was GIF, and at the time there were serious concerns about Unisys flexing copyright against everyone.
XBM and XPM were well defined, easy, and free - and since everyone was on a UNIX box at the time, it was probably a good choice!
My guess is those were the popular image formats of the day. PNG wasn’t even around in 1993, Wikipedia says it was standardized in 1996. As for JPEG, it looks like it was first standardized in 1992.
Right, PNG was developed in response to the Unisys patent on LZW, which affected GIFs (and also ZIP files, but they never went after that as aggressively). That had probably not actually been publicly discussed and generated negative sentiment at the time of this thread, though; Wikipedia dates the start of the dispute to 1993, and the contentious parts to 1995, which fits my dim memory.
XBM and XPM were very much in use for X Windows users at the time, who were a disproportionate share of developers. Those formats ultimately became disused, no doubt due to the lack of compression, but the importance of bandwidth-efficiency wasn’t obvious when building the very early web. :)
As a larger point, today there are well-established file formats that everybody knows about and uses. At the time, there were fragmented sub-communities who were all using totally incompatible technologies, largely unaware of each other. In fact, it was really the web that changed that.
IIRC it was pretty well known by 93 that GIFs were patent encumbered because Unisys started signing patent agreements by… 89 or 90. But you’re right, I don’t think the real furor started until later.
My understanding is that ZIP files always used DEFLATE; that the Unisys patent never threatened DEFLATE, only LZW; and that DEFLATE was picked for the PNG standard partly because it wasn’t threatened by the Unisys patent (and also because it tends to be a slower, higher-compression-ratio algorithm than LZW ♥).
Closed: OBSOLETE
Please use
amp-imgtag on all new sites for moar better user experience.WebComponents will rock the world! Long live the age of user-defined tags! w00t, w00t!
Well, are you gonna add it @jcs?
Imagine the documentation had they gone with Tim Berners-Lee suggestion in using the ‘<A>’ tag for images. We would be living in a slightly more frustrating world…
Heh, no mention of JPEG or PNG. Why did the author think XBM and XPM were good to support?
JPEG’s first public release was Sep 1992 making it extremely new, and PNG was sometime in 1995, so not invented yet. The only other offering was GIF, and at the time there were serious concerns about Unisys flexing copyright against everyone.
XBM and XPM were well defined, easy, and free - and since everyone was on a UNIX box at the time, it was probably a good choice!
Understood, thanks for the history. :)
My guess is those were the popular image formats of the day. PNG wasn’t even around in 1993, Wikipedia says it was standardized in 1996. As for JPEG, it looks like it was first standardized in 1992.
Right, PNG was developed in response to the Unisys patent on LZW, which affected GIFs (and also ZIP files, but they never went after that as aggressively). That had probably not actually been publicly discussed and generated negative sentiment at the time of this thread, though; Wikipedia dates the start of the dispute to 1993, and the contentious parts to 1995, which fits my dim memory.
XBM and XPM were very much in use for X Windows users at the time, who were a disproportionate share of developers. Those formats ultimately became disused, no doubt due to the lack of compression, but the importance of bandwidth-efficiency wasn’t obvious when building the very early web. :)
As a larger point, today there are well-established file formats that everybody knows about and uses. At the time, there were fragmented sub-communities who were all using totally incompatible technologies, largely unaware of each other. In fact, it was really the web that changed that.
Speaking of dim memories…
IIRC it was pretty well known by 93 that GIFs were patent encumbered because Unisys started signing patent agreements by… 89 or 90. But you’re right, I don’t think the real furor started until later.
My understanding is that ZIP files always used DEFLATE; that the Unisys patent never threatened DEFLATE, only LZW; and that DEFLATE was picked for the PNG standard partly because it wasn’t threatened by the Unisys patent (and also because it tends to be a slower, higher-compression-ratio algorithm than LZW ♥).
Ah! Perhaps so, and that explains why it wasn’t an issue. Possibly affected in theory because the format does support many codecs.