apng, mng, and bogus corrections
Standards suck, when those controlling the standard aren’t pragmatic enough to do things in sane ways. Of course, this is where the WHATWG came from, and from what I’ve seen there, we have a huge opportunity to improve on something the w3c isn’t willing to deal with.
Now comes apng, at a < 5k footprint, and designed to degrade gracefully on non-compliant decoders. Of course, this has ramped up the “why not MNG?” argument, most visibly on Gerv’s blog. Of course, he talks about correcting misinformation, then proceeds to leave out critical facts that deflate the points.
First point is “yes its bloated, but so are SVG/XHTML/XForms and we’re doing those too.” Bloat should not justify other bloat. Trying to argue based on that logic is worthy of slashdot posters, not mozilla.org staff. Also, all of those standards are being pushed by w3c and corporate interests, especially in the Mozilla-as-platform world, whereas MNG isn’t.
Using MNG_BUILD_WEB_NO_JNG would supposedly cost only 48k of footprint. This is of course using the MNG decoder for PNG, which has already been rejected as being slower and less stable/tested than libpng. Even glennrp stated that because of the impl, it’ll always be slower. Drivers set the bar for replacing libpng as being eqivalent to libpng in perf/stability, which isn’t going to happen anytime soon, so 48k isn’t accurate.
There’s other arguments based on the false 48k figure (the real figure was 108k on FreeBSD), like the “sixfold reduction in size” which is only true if you a) assume the bogus 48k figure and b) you consider the MNG_BUILD_WEB_NO_JNG profile equivalent to the orginal full impl.
Giving bad/incomplete/misleading data is bad, doing it in the name of correcting misinformation is just terrible. Its also a little shocking that Gerv missed the point of apng, which is to provide a format that can be animated, but still degrades gracefully on other browsers. MNG doesn’t do that, and the minimum footprint is 21x the size, based on glennrp’s latest figures for the profile in question.
I don’t think he was arguing that bloat justifies bloat. I do think he was arguing that the bloat of MNG is not a valid reason to disclaim it. All other arguments against MNG are still valid, but he’s dismissing the bloat aspect as ignorable because it’s been ignored before (although the parts he’s cited are all *not* enabled by default, while MNG/APNG for the intended uses *would* be enabled by default – which just might destroy the entire argument). That said, he still didn’t address the other aspects (speed, stability, etc.) of MNG. Personally, I’m not sure I really care, although I’d tend to lean toward small as opposed to big.
I see a difference between these two points of view (bloat can’t be used as an argument against vs. bloat can’t justify bloat). Feel free to explain to me why there isn’t a difference.
If you’re saying that you can’t argue against bloat because there’s bloat elsewhere, you are essentially saying that the bloat in the current case is not relevant, which is a form of justification. Not in the “this is okay because” form (“I shot him in self-defense”) but in the “it doesn’t matter” form (“I’m already on death row, why not kill a couple guards”).
“Giving bad/incomplete/misleading data is bad, doing it in the name of correcting misinformation is just terrible.”
I really don’t see that it’s any worse.
The “slashdot” logic may be flawed, but the original “logic” was nonexistant – various Mozilla folks have given different and inconsistent hand-waving arguments in different places, so nobody really knows why MNG was rejected and it’s impossible to have a sensible discussion about it.
Anyway, I look forward to Firefox 2.0 being a 30.05MB download and fully implementing XForms, SVG and XHTML 2, and will be thankful that APNG has ensured that it’s not 30.20MB
> Anyway, I look forward to Firefox 2.0 being a 30.05MB download and fully implementing XForms, SVG and XHTML 2, and will be thankful that APNG has ensured that it’s not 30.20MB
This is diskspace, the talk is about footprint.
Anonymous – you’re correct, but given that I was pulling silly numbers out of the air, it’s academic. The point is that all the other stuff would have a far bigger footprint, if/when it got implemented
Okay… first i could care less about MNG and even less about apng… but I have to ask…
First point is “yes its bloated, but so are SVG/XHTML/XForms and we’re doing those too.” Bloat should not justify other bloat…. Also, all of those standards are being pushed by w3c and corporate interests, especially in the Mozilla-as-platform world, whereas MNG isn’t.
Why on earth did you use that wording? I’m sorry but that sounds as if your saying bloat is good if you have corporate interests jamming it down ones throat. I would personally prefer a bloated unused standard over a smaller yet non-standard technology. I undrstand the footprint bloat fight of the old mozilla suite days but… thats a horriable argument.
Note that XHTML/SVG/XForms are W3C standards, MNG isn’t, and isn’t an ISO spec either. Also, if IBM, Adobe, and others are pushing and supporting a technology, it’ll get much more interest/usage than a technology with no corporate interest. Implementing bloaty stuff that no one uses and no one is going to use is bad, implementing bloaty stuff that people will use and companies will back is less so.
Thanks… clears that up… and like I said I really don’t about MNG or APNG… and the entire discussion on MNG was silly.. and APNG well… we will see.
Let’s be clear about those other bloats here as well as in other places.
SVG is something we want to eat, as we consider that an important part of mozilla-the-platform. (“we” being the folks like brendan and other drivers.)
XForms is not going to be shipped. It will be an extension, based on XTF. *That* is going to ship, and that is going to increase download and runtime size. But it is going to be shared with other drop-in features, and XHTML2 may be one of those, hopefully.
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