Portable Network Graphics (PNG /ˈpɪŋ/ PING) is a bitmapped image format that employs lossless data compression. PNG was created to improve upon and replace GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) as an image-file format not requiring a patent license.
PNG supports palette-based images (with palettes of 24-bit RGB or 32-bit RGBA colors), grayscale images (with or without alpha channel), and full-color non-palette-based RGB images (with or without alpha channel). PNG was designed for transferring images on the Internet, not for professional-quality print graphics, and therefore does not support non-RGB color spaces such as CMYK.
PNG files nearly always use file extension PNG or png and are assigned MIME media type image/png; it was approved for this use by the Internet Engineering Steering Group on 14 October 1996. PNG was published as an ISO/IEC standard in 2004.
Read more about Portable Network Graphics: History and Development, PNG Working Group, File Size and Optimization Software
Famous quotes containing the words portable and/or network:
“In the quilts I had found good objects—hospitable, warm, with soft edges yet resistant, with boundaries yet suggesting a continuous safe expanse, a field that could be bundled, a bundle that could be unfurled, portable equipment, light, washable, long-lasting, colorful, versatile, functional and ornamental, private and universal, mine and thine.”
—Radka Donnell-Vogt, U.S. quiltmaker. As quoted in Lives and Works, by Lynn F. Miller and Sally S. Swenson (1981)
“How have I been able to live so long outside Nature without identifying myself with it? Everything lives, moves, everything corresponds; the magnetic rays, emanating either from myself or from others, cross the limitless chain of created things unimpeded; it is a transparent network that covers the world, and its slender threads communicate themselves by degrees to the planets and stars. Captive now upon earth, I commune with the chorus of the stars who share in my joys and sorrows.”
—Gérard De Nerval (1808–1855)