[Bug 18574] restore support for MNG and JNG

Discussion of bugs in Seamonkey
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Old GlennRP
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Post by Old GlennRP »

Yes, it's possible. That's how the patch works. You have to enable MNG decoding in your .mozconfig after you have applied the patch. What's needed now is a reviewer.
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raj_bhaskar
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Post by raj_bhaskar »

Have you discussed this with someone on the SeaMonkey Council? Maybe CTho or KaiRo could review.
Old GlennRP
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Post by Old GlennRP »

I've separated the mng patch into one that adds the mng library and another (with trunk and branch versions) that adds mng "glue" to libpr0n and various configuration files. You need both the "add-libmng" patch and the appropriate "mng glue" patch. The "add-libmng" patch is not likely to be subject to bit-rot, while the "glue" patches will probably be updated frequently. The patches are available at http://mngzilla.sf.net in the DOWNLOAD area, mngzilla-patches package.
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Ashitaka
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Post by Ashitaka »

GlennRP wrote:What's needed? The patches work fine, except for occasional bit-rot which I fix as soon as I notice it. The current patches are at mngzilla.sf.net because we were politely kicked off of bug #18574 in December.
Oh, I did not see those comments on the bug page. I assume this is why they removed the "most voted on bugs" link from the Bugzilla front page, as well.
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KaiRo
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Post by KaiRo »

raj_bhaskar wrote:Have you discussed this with someone on the SeaMonkey Council? Maybe CTho or KaiRo could review.


Neither CTho nor me could review. Only the owner or peers of the modules where the code lands can review. And the code needs to land in areas of the repository that are very tightly controlled by people who dislike MNG by principle :(
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DopefishJustin
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Post by DopefishJustin »

zachariah wrote:then it is silly to convert GIF to MNG


Assuming you consider reducing the file size and saving bandwidth "silly". No, it's not a massive savings, but if you use huge animated GIFs with lots of frames (which is more and more common these days, look at YTMND) it adds up.
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zachariah
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Post by zachariah »

DopefishJustin wrote:
zachariah wrote:then it is silly to convert GIF to MNG


Assuming you consider reducing the file size and saving bandwidth "silly". No, it's not a massive savings, but if you use huge animated GIFs with lots of frames (which is more and more common these days, look at YTMND) it adds up.


that's why I said the second part:
zachariah wrote:..., but MNG is still a superior technology to GIF for animations you create


All I meant is that its now silly just to convert based (solely) on patent issues.

I am one of the people who really, really, really wishes that MNG would be natively supported.
especially (because as far as I understand) it doesn't add bloat

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Ashitaka
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Post by Ashitaka »

It's too late now.

1) Firefox 1.0 is out of the bag, so most of the 10% using Firefox are no longer impelled to upgrade to a future MNG version.
2) There isn't any promising free software that generates MNGs with its special features.
3) MNG's most desirable feature, more than 256 colors, is getting deprecated because Flash is becoming standard for that kind of animation. Flash is even better than MNG because it uses vector graphics, and supports interactivity and sound, and it's popular now. It would be much more efficient to use the open SWF standard and write a native SWF viewer for Firefox.
4) The cabal dislikes MNG, for reasons we may never know.
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KaiRo
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Post by KaiRo »

Ashitaka wrote:3) MNG's most desirable feature, more than 256 colors, is getting deprecated because Flash is becoming standard for that kind of animation. Flash is even better than MNG because it uses vector graphics, and supports interactivity and sound, and it's popular now. It would be much more efficient to use the open SWF standard and write a native SWF viewer for Firefox.


Which OPEN swf standard?

SWF is one of the most closed formats I know (next to MS Office, AFAIK even more closed than PDF), and just because there's one popular piece of software that produces/uses it, it's not even a standard at all. It's just some proprietary format.

The only open vector format I know for use in web browsing is SVG, and we already do support that one.

Anyways, a vector format is no bitmap format and vice versa. And we still support no high-quality animated bitmap format, though a modern web should support such a format.
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Eyal Rozenberg
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Post by Eyal Rozenberg »

Wait, what Ashitaka's saying sounds very interesting. Leaving the openness issue behind, is SWF a better format than MNG, say, size-wise? decoder-complexity-wise? If so, maybe SWF or an open counterpart may supplant MNG before it even takes off... Please elaborate for the sake of those of us who are not particularly familiar with any of these formats.
Old GlennRP
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Post by Old GlennRP »

Eyal Rozenberg wrote:Wait, what Ashitaka's saying sounds very interesting. Leaving the openness issue behind, is SWF a better format than MNG, say, size-wise? decoder-complexity-wise? If so, maybe SWF or an open counterpart may supplant MNG before it even takes off... Please elaborate for the sake of those of us who are not particularly familiar with any of these formats.


See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swf
and follow the link from there to Alexis' SWF Reference

SWF has about 70 "tags" compared to MNG's 20 or so "chunks"
SWF is vector-based with simple images and thus competes more with SVG than MNG, which
is image-based.
Its lossless images are PNG-like (without PNG filtering) with an optional alpha channel and zlib-compressed. The lossless images won't always compress quite as well as full PNG.
The simple lossy images are JPEG with or without transparency, like MNG's JNG format.

The SWF Specification license forbids using it to write a decoder. The MNG spec allows
you to write one.

Glenn
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Eyal Rozenberg
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Post by Eyal Rozenberg »

GlennRP wrote:The SWF Specification license forbids using it to write a decoder. The MNG spec allows you to write one.

Maybe there's some way to get around this. e.g. someone who has read the specs could write a program which generates simple SWFs according to parameters provided. Then someone else could use that program to reverse engineer the structure of SWFs. Or is that illegal?
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Dark Phoenix
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Post by Dark Phoenix »

Eyal Rozenberg wrote:If so, maybe SWF or an open counterpart may supplant MNG before it even takes off... Please elaborate for the sake of those of us who are not particularly familiar with any of these formats.


I bloody well hope not... The series of jumps in logic that leads to points to a familiar outcome, since Microsoft is trying to push XPS as a potential replacement for PDF and SWF, built right into Windows.

I don't know about you, but the idea of another Microsoft "standard" polluting the web scares me.
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hkazemi
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Post by hkazemi »

Flash as an MNG replacement? Well, Flash is filling the niche with fewer animated GIFs, but its because there isn't another good alternative. This is also chicken-egg situation...no MNG support means no MNG tools means no MNG usage means no MNG support. Expecting other browsers to support MNG before Firefox/Mozilla is not a good strategy either, as they all have smaller market share than Firefox or MS IE. I think Firefox support for MNG would open the doors for better MNG tools and wider usage. Finally you get the benefit of being able to depend on open standards instead of proprietary de-facto standards. It's kinda like MS Word .DOCs vs. OpenOffice XML files. Why should OpenOffice support an open format when it can use a reverse engineered parsing/writing interface to .DOC ?

My vote is to add MNG support to Firefox (as part of Firefox version 3) and Seamonkey.
kyber
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Re: Way to encourage MNG usage.

Post by kyber »

kyber wrote:This just ocurred to me.
I should start using *this* on all the images that could use it. Heck, it is part of the spec.

Code: Select all

<object  data="/images/complexfuzzyalpha.jng" type="image/x-jng">
    <object  data="/images/massive.png" type="image/png">
        Wife's face that I decided to hover over page content
     </object>
</object>
or
<object  data="/images/crispbeautifulfullcolor.mng" type="video/x-mng">
    <object  data="/images/cheapassalternate.gif" type="image/gif">
        Cute fluttering bird following mouse around or something
     </object>
</object>

Such stuff falls nicely into my attitude towards neat bits of the web tech you wish browsers would support. You can't force it on people, but you *can* offer it as a bonus for supporting browsers.
I use that same philosophy with opacity/-moz-opacity, border-radius/-moz-border-radius, png translucency, position: fixed and now... I think I will start doing it with MNG/JNG.


Update on this one. I've been using object tag a great deal for uses like this, or for serving content of an arbitrary type from a database. Recently, after losing a lawsuit, Microsoft introduced a click to activate any ActiveX - due to their idiotic <object> implementation, this is *all* <object> tags. Additionally, this click prompt apparently breaks the loading of objects in IE - whether they are an image, or a movie or text.
Don't know if the folks here care that much, but it does put a crimp in using it as a failover. I personally went ahead and added a little IE detection code. I think folks using IE need to get used to the web looking a little more primitive and having fewer features (not saying breaking any functionality mind you). ;)
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