Hi,

What is the best format for saving images in, for website, and that can be read by most browsers ?

Regards,
Garry

PNG. The 8-bit one, as 24 bit PNG's transparency is not properly rendered yet in some browsers.
PNG has much better compression than GIF.

PNG for static images, GIF - for animated ones.

But most browsers nowadays 'understand' both OK

The PNG is preferred when it comes to website design. Why? Developed as a patent-free answer to the GIF format, the PNG became a major improvement of the GIFs. An image in PNG format may be up to 5-25 % more compressed than a GIF of one and the same image. Among the pluses of the PNGs is that they enable opacity, a major minus - PNGs doesn't support animations, while GIF does.

PNG almost always compresses down farther than gifs. PNG-24 is not very practical for Web work, but I would say 90% of my lossless-compressed images are PNGs.

To be honest I normally use gifs or jpegs but I always keep a png of every image I do for editing purposes

png. Better than gif or jpeg

PNG , but for animated banners and graphics on web - gif .

:-)

I normally use PNGs (you can have them highly compressed and still they won't lack quality) in website design. Only if I need animated images for some purpose I go with GIFs. :agree:

Hi,

I'm not sure if the issue still remains, however one of the main reasons that png never took off as much as gif (which was actually a proprietary CompuServe format), was because Internet Explorer had difficulty displaying them properly in certain instances, consequently gif would be the better option.

Cyber Mark - as mentioned in this thread, IE had problems with 24 bit PNG only. The 8 bit one was displayed properly.
Unfortunately a lot of designers tend to repeat this opinion ("PNGs are not properly displayed") without knowing the facts, which results in this format being less popular than it deserves.

Cyber Mark - as mentioned in this thread, IE had problems with 24 bit PNG only. The 8 bit one was displayed properly.
Unfortunately a lot of designers tend to repeat this opinion ("PNGs are not properly displayed") without knowing the facts, which results in this format being less popular than it deserves.
It is absolutely true - PNGs are underrespected which comes right from that point - 24 bits are inproperly displayed when it comes to Internet Explorer. However, to me the 8 bit ones are perfect in terms of compression and quality.:agree:

PNGs are by far the best choice. Just be careful when using 24 bit with transparency (if the entire image is opaque, you don't have to worry about it), that's where IE6 and below have issues. IE does not support alpha transparency without work-arounds. I've heard they finally fixed this issue in IE7, though.

The only reason you'd really want to use GIFs is for very, very small images in which case they do tend to have the smaller file size (small icons, for example), or for animated images.

JPEGs are still useful for photos.