In the 1990s I remember the horror of making images for the web with Photoshop because inevitably Photoshop would try some kind of color correction that would have been appropriate for print output but it ensured that the colors were wrong every time on the screen. There was talk about upgrading PNG to support the equivalent of animated GIFs but it never really happened because of complexity, seeĪs for color spaces that is a case where things get worse before they get better. Today, latest image formats also do this competition of ticking every checkbox to even worse degree by adding animation that is worse than any video format in the last 20 years, support all the obsolete analog video color spaces, redundant ICC color profiles alongside better built-in color spaces, etc. But these features were needed to compete with GIF on low-memory machines and slow modems. PNG could be simpler now if it didn't support 1/2/4-bit depths, keyed 1-bit alpha for opaque modes, or interlacing. The CRC was originally a big feature, because back then filesystems didn't have checksums, people used unreliable disks, and FTPs with automatic DOS/Unix/Mac line ending conversions were mangling files. I think it is pretty pragmatic and relatively simple, even though in hindsight some features were unnecessary. Off-the-shelf DEFLATE implementations were easily available since its inception. It's a format designed for the Web, so it has to have a decent compression level. PNG is not a format for uncompressed or RLE "hello worlds".
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