Differences between version 4 and revision by previous author of GIF.
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| Newer page: | version 4 | Last edited on Thursday, December 18, 2003 11:35:07 pm | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
| Older page: | version 3 | Last edited on Tuesday, September 10, 2002 8:01:09 pm | by CraigBox | Revert |
@@ -1,5 +1,3 @@
[Acronym] for __G__raphics __I__nterchange __F__ormat.
-A FileFormat useful
for block colour
images created
by CompuServe in the 1980's(?).
-
-Is famous for Unisys's Submarine Patent. Years after GIF became
the defacto standard Unisys turned up one day and said "GIF uses
[LZW] compression, we have a patent on that, we want everyone who has a program
to generate GIF files
to pay us a royalty
."
This pissed
a lot of people off. Some people got so pissed off they created a file format called
[PNG] which has the same target as [GIF] but does everything [GIF] does much much better. Most websites now prefer [PNG] over [GIF
] files
.
+A FileFormat for palettized
images of at most 256 colours. It was designed
by CompuServe in the 1980's utilizing
the lossless
[LZW] compression [Algorithm]
to make it easier
to share images online
. This should later become
a major headache; see
[Unisys
].
