Remember the days before Flash when you used to browse the web and the one way that everyone used to trick out their website was with fancy animated gifs??Well, if not, that's o.k. because that was sometime back. But, there was a time when I can remember making a website in which to show movement and something more than a static page was making some pretty tricky animated gifs.I just read that Mozilla is finally replacing the animated gif format in browsers which is quite old, and adding a new format called, "APNG." APNG is a advanced version of the PNG graphic file format. The advanced version will allow animated graphics, like the animated gif format, but will add some great few features that animated gif - did not allow.



APNG will allow Transparency and full 32 bit PNG display in animated format. No big deal. Maybe not. But I always felt still to this day a place for the old animated gif format. There are Still a lot of reasons to use it. It still is a small alternative to Flash. The one thing that is a set back is the fact that animated gifs do not allow transparency. That may seem like not a big deal but it is. The other day I made a animated gif for a client but could not use it because I could not make it transparent. These days everything is going CSS. Typically in a CSS based website layout it is common to embed a backround image in the CSS scripting. About 80% of all CSS sites do this. If you place a non-transparent image over the backround it doesn't look pretty. Also, as far as I know. Flash still does not support proper transparency. This used to be an issue I dealt with years ago but they might have changed it. There is a work-around but it's still not true transparency. With the new release of animated PNG, there just might be a renew interest of a fancy version of animated gif. It may not seem like a big deal but you may see someone occasionally cutting back on overuse of Flash.The great thing about this format is it is backwards compatible. This means if a browser doesn't support it then it will still display the PNG image. Now if we could just get something like that with SVG file format built into FireFox.','Remember the days before Flash when you used to browse the web and the one way that everyone used to trick out their website was with fancy animated gifs?? Well, if not, that's o.k. because that was sometime back. But, there was a time when I can remember making a website in which to show movement and something more than a static page was making some pretty tricky animated gifs.