When you say historically, how far back are we going? I learnt html in 1999/2000 and was experimenting with the different save options in windows photo editor(?) on windows 98 or NT and that’s where I learnt about png and that it works on websites. I don’t think anyone else I knew at the time heard of anything besides jpg and gif for website images back then. But it did work and I used it on my Line Wars fansite on tripod.
PNG took forever to reach baseline usability. Obviously because of IE. I don’t remember exactly, but if you targeted IE you couldn’t use a lot of CSS features and PNG support was shaky at best. I think transparency in PNG just didn’t work.
We only had internet explorer in school. I think I didn’t even switch to old school Mozilla at home until after I finished sixth form in 2002, or maybe towards the end of my school days. PNG with transparency definitely worked on IE when I was making fansites on tripod or I wouldn’t have used it. I have a feeling I don’t have my old Line Wars site files anymore, but I’ll check next time I’m on the PC. I might have left them on floppy disks.
Fun fact: the GIF image format actually supports still images. Occasionally, for some reason, people actually use it for that.
It’s great for certain images because it supports a restricted palette and doesn’t blur edges. It’s fantastic for sprites.
It’s not bad for 7-Ups, too
Historically, non-animated .gif had some uses. For example small border insets in webpages, when the limited (or non-existant) CSS wasn’t enough.
JPEG is awful at straight corners and lines, basically anything that isn’t a photo. PNG didn’t exist back then.
When you say historically, how far back are we going? I learnt html in 1999/2000 and was experimenting with the different save options in windows photo editor(?) on windows 98 or NT and that’s where I learnt about png and that it works on websites. I don’t think anyone else I knew at the time heard of anything besides jpg and gif for website images back then. But it did work and I used it on my Line Wars fansite on tripod.
PNG took forever to reach baseline usability. Obviously because of IE. I don’t remember exactly, but if you targeted IE you couldn’t use a lot of CSS features and PNG support was shaky at best. I think transparency in PNG just didn’t work.
We only had internet explorer in school. I think I didn’t even switch to old school Mozilla at home until after I finished sixth form in 2002, or maybe towards the end of my school days. PNG with transparency definitely worked on IE when I was making fansites on tripod or I wouldn’t have used it. I have a feeling I don’t have my old Line Wars site files anymore, but I’ll check next time I’m on the PC. I might have left them on floppy disks.