> Hopefully, the PNG group will jump in here. I *believe* that PNG *might* be
> able to do both. I'll research this later this week. (late note: I see from the
> list that it could).
PNG does have provision for multiple compression formats. In
principle it could support lossy compression, but as I said
elsewhere, the PNG team currently feels this would be a mistake.
However, as better lossless compression comes along, PNG will be able
to accomodate it.
PNG currently uses the same deflate/inflate algorithm used in Pkzip,
zip, and gzip. I don't expect difserent compression to be added any
time soon.
> Of course, here we are building 3D worlds, and cesating an entire file and
> application architecture 'on line' .... perhaps building a image file format,
> i.e. comming up with VRML extensions for PNG isn't such a bad idea. We're
> writing the browsers 'from the ground up' anyway ....
If anyone has ideas for VRML extensions of PNG, lst me know. One
person here proposed to me that "goto" URL's could be stored in PNG
image maps. Frankly I don't see why anyone would want to do this, but
it is extremely easy if the idea has merit. A new chunk could be
defined to do this, but you could also use the existing comment chunk
and use the keyword "URL"..
Tim