Archive for the ‘HTML’ Category.

A Quick Introduction to Animated PNG

pictureThe GIF format – the animation standard for web page animations for pretty much as long as there have been web page animations – was originally created in 1987. While there were technically computers back then, chances are you’re presently wearing a watch with more processing power than a circa-1987 PC.

The GIF format was designed using late twentieth-century compression technology, for use with late twentieth-century display hardware.

It’s also probably worth mentioning that GIF was never intended as a medium for storing web page animations… there having been no web upon which to launch pages back in 1987. They did have electric lighting back then, apparently, so there’s that.

The first web browsers to support animation arm-twisted the GIF format to store them because it was kind of close to what was needed at the time, and it actually existed. Web page designers – and everyone else – have been stuck with it ever since.

Cue gratuitous profanity.

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A Quick Introduction to WebP Graphics and Animations

The WebP format was developed by Google as a twenty-first century replacement for the aging hoard of mutant armadillos which has previously served the web as graphic standards. It can be used in place of still image formats, such as JPEG and PNG, and it really gets up and dances when it’s used to replace the medieval relic that is GIF to manage animations.

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WebP offers both lossless image compression like PNG and lossy image compression like JPEG. It uses vastly more effective image compression than existed when the foregoing formats were originally created back at the dawn of human civilization, resulting in both smaller animation files and better looking ones. It supports full alpha transparency.

It also handles timing in milliseconds, rather than in the hundredths of a second that GIF uses.

A Digression On Compression

In case the whole lossless and lossy compression issue sounds a bit like two Martians discussing what to order for lunch, here’s a brief digression on the matter.

Graphic files are by their nature sort of huge, and huge files can be a bit of an issue if you have a finite amount of storage space, such as on the SD memory card of a digital camera, or a finite amount of bandwidth over which to transmit said files, such as the Internet if you didn’t spring for a gigabit fiber connection.

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The Art of the Round Corner Box

Web page frames having clean rounded corners are fashionable at the moment. While you can arrive at them with considerable work using conventional tools, you can create them effortlessly using Graphic Workshop Professional 3. Most of the tricky aspects of getting all the pixels in these complex web objects to line up correctly fade to inconsequence once you have the procedure by the throat.

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Animated favicons

If you visit the GIF Construction Set Professional web page at with Firefox, you might notice that the favicon is an animation, rather than a static Windows icon.

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