GNOME Developer Comes Up With New Animated Image Format

Jasper St. Pierre who we're usually talking about on Phoronix due to his GNOME contributions related to Wayland support, shared today he's come up with a new animated image format to compete with GIF.

While GIF is technologically out-of-date with its compression support and other features, alternative animated image file formats like APNG and MNG haven't taken off. However, Jasper ended up devising a new image format called XNG. XNG doesn't impose any restrictions, can support more complex functionality, and will work existing HTML5 browsers of today.

Using XNG on the web doesn't require any external JavaScript libraries for support or anything else but seamlessly manages to work within at least Firefox and Chrome. The technical details of XNG have yet to be exposed in-depth but he will be following up with more posts and XNG examples in the days ahead.

Those wishing to learn more about XNG can read Jasper's blog post. "Over the next few days, I’ll talk a bit more about XNG. I hope all you hackers out there look into it and notice what I’m doing: I think there’s certainly a lot of unexplored ideas in what I’ve developed. We can push this envelope further."