The world of online graphics is getting a boost from an unlikely source. Siegel and Gale, a marketing and branding company with a large technology development arm, says it was so anxious to get better graphics capability for its clients that it designed a Netscape Communicator plug-in to allow users to display the Portable Network Graphics format (PNG).
Collaborating with Netscape - which has been a Siegel and Gale marketing customer since before its IPO - the branding company launched PNG Live 2.0 last week. The push, says Siegel and Gale team leader Andrew Zolli, was to give users the ability to use and see the advantages of the new graphics format. Although PNG has been embraced and recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, it is not yet supported by either of the major browsers.
The PNG format was developed by the PNG Working Group - which was quickly incorporated into the World Wide Web Consortium - in January both as a remedy to the shortcomings of the aging GIF format and a response to Unisys' and CompuServe's announcement that they would be pursuing royalties for the use of GIFs.
GIF remains the Internet standard, but PNG is viewed by many as a clearly superior format. Despite its advantages, the implementation of PNG has, in the past, been buggy and uninspiring.
The advantages of PNG include a more efficient compression scheme as well as the ability to use a number of pallet sizes, from the 1-bit variety to 48-bit "truecolor." The format also claims a far more sophisticated means of handling blends and transparencies. Interesting from a Web surfer's point of view is the ability to embed meta-tags within images, giving users the ability to search for the images. Use of the PNG format will not require a royalty fee, so all are free to use it.
At the heart of Siegel and Gale's efforts was a desire to find a more accurate way of describing and maintaining correct color tone, a real issue in branding. For example, American Express' identity is linked to a certain shade of blue. If that shade doesn't register on the Web, then the integrity of its brand is lost, Zolli said. "If you spent a lot of time creating a page with American Express blue, you want it to match."
Working closely with Netscape allowed Siegel and Gale to get the browser maker to extend a part of the program's functioning, the plug-in API, so that loading a plug-in could be automatically triggered by the browser encountering an unfamiliar format. Also incorporated was the ability to display partially transparent images, creating overlays, shadows, and collages.
Greg Roelofs of the PNG Group believes the extensions Netscape has included at Siegel and Gale's suggestion mean that "plug-ins have finally achieved their promise, at least from the perspective of 2-D images." Roelofs is glad that Netscape is "finally listening to their third-party developers."
Native support of PNG files - which is implemented in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0b1 - would be better though, he said, pointing out that Unix and Mac users of Netscape's browser are "currently out of luck."
