Re: [AD] GIF patent / support

["Chris La Mantia" <celamantia@xxxxxxxxxx>]

From: "Elias Pschernig" <allefant@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Nah, that has nothing to do with it for sure - else why do we support
> BMP and not XPM? And PNG doesn't even support animation, so it will
> never replace GIF on websites. Only not-animated pictures just make
> not much sense for a website (so you have to use GIF, and why then
> also use PNG), and for photos you have JPG.

I was under the impression that there was animation support in the
specification, but it is not widely implemented.

> I agree, LBM (and also PCX) support should be in addons. And as was
> said the last time we talked about this on this list I think - GIF
> animations would be hard to support with the current load_bitmap API

At the time, PCX was a common image format.  I'm not sure LBM was ever
common.  Although it's true that in this day and age LBM (if not all image
formats) would be add-ons, it is counter-productive to remove working
formats from Allegro.  However, it still seems reasonable to internally
support at least one common format.  I'm sure if it was easy to do so and
did not introduce any licensing changes or library dependencies, PNG would
be internally supported.  As it stands, though, that is not possible (to the
best of my knowledge).  I still believe that the underlying argument against
GIF is the predjudice against it as a result of Unisys's actions and that
the "external add-on" is just a convenient way to brush it aside.

GIF animation is a different animal, and I don't believe it should be
internally supported, although the more I think about it, the more
interesting an "animated sprite" type sounds... hmm ... :)

--Chris