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July 07, 2006

PNG vs OpenRaster?

PNG vs OpenRaster? Odd article at NewsForge... talks about movement towards a new type of raster file format for opensource projects (see their wiki for intro)... meanwhile, PNG was the very first Recommendation from the W3C, then became an ISO standard, and is also extensible as well (that's how Fireworks works, btw)... yet the article and wiki don't seem to even mention PNG as a solution for these graphic needs. I'm not sure if they're unaware of PNG's true power, or if it doesn't meet their needs in some way, or if there's a historical conflict, a NIH problem, or other.

Posted by JohnDowdell at July 7, 2006 02:44 PM

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There *are* some hits from mailing lists on search term "openraster png", but it's hard to quickly see if any are definitive... none of these points were promoted up into the two source articles linked above.

Posted by: John Dowdell at July 7, 2006 02:46 PM

Thankfully, it sounds as if it's meant to serve as the extensible document level (like what FW itself does to PNG), instead of the final, raster image that only today we're seeing being widely adopted as PNG (although old MSIE still doesn't support it... grrr). On that aspect, PNG is already enough unless we move on to 16/32bits per channel... and I don't see this happening on this century.

Posted by: zeh at July 7, 2006 04:27 PM

For an answer to your post; see
http://cyrilleberger.blogspot.com/2006/06/why-openraster-is-needed.html

[jd sez: Going there, reading, and abstracting the argument, it seems to become "I need CMYK". (PNG works quite well for what is commonly described as "layers", as Fireworks has proven the past few years.) ]

Posted by: Thomas Zander at July 12, 2006 06:51 AM