…your ultimate guide to blogs

When bloggers or web programmers wanted to place an image which has a transparency feature in it, they use either GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) or PNG (Portable Network Graphics). Basically, transparent images are used to allow the background of these pictures to be seen. Most web pages use this feature, and it is because of one simple purpose: enhancing web page design.

Now these 2 image formats may have the same common feature, but they do differ in some points, and here we’ll discuss why it’s better to use GIF rather than PNG:

1. GIF is normally smaller in size than PNG. I’m talking about KB or Kilobytes. The smaller the size of the image, the faster it takes to be loaded and be used in the web page.
2. GIF is much more available in a lot of photo editing softwares than PNG. There are more applications which support an output image file for GIF. This means, you can easily create GIF images rather than PNG.
3. GIF transparency is supported by almost all browsers unlike PNG, some old browsers do not recognize the transparency of this format. So if your main reason of placing a PNG is for transparency, those people who are using old browsers won’t be able to appreciate it.

Though GIF does have a lot of advantages such as mentioned above, there is this one big reason why sometimes, programmers decide to use PNG:

1. PNG has a lot better quality than GIF. Especially if your images are too small, GIF doesn’t look better than PNG. PNG generally looks clearer than GIF.

Now for you to have a clear look on the difference of both images, if you have a Firefox 2.0 or higher and an Internet Explorer 6.0 or earlier installed in your computer, try to do this:

1. Go to Start | Run, then type "firefox http://ronaldborla.info/images/whygifnotpng.htm".
2. Go to Start | Run again, then this time, type "iexplore http://ronaldborla.info/images/whygifnotpng.htm".

I’ve set this web page into a background color which takes advantage of a transparency feature of an image. Try to compare the speed of loading the image, and the transparency support, as well as the quality.

Anyway, in the end it would still be up to you. If you think more people use new browsers, and they’re internet speed aren’t that slow to take time to load these images, then it would be completely alright to use PNG. Also, if you are concerned on how great your web page would look like, then try to sometimes suggest or recommend to the users to use the latest versions of their browsers, like this:

For a better browsing experience, get the new Firefox 3.0, the best browser on the web!