PNG
Portable Network Graphics is a file format for storing images. Files in this format have the extension .png.
PNG was introduced in the 1990s as an alternative to the GIF format. The main reason for this was the mandatory license to support GIF in software.
Apart from the lack of patents, another advantage of Portable Network Graphics is that compression is applied without loss of quality. The file size of PNG images is smaller while maintaining quality.
PNG, like JPEG, supports up to 16 million colors. If this number is reduced to a fixed defined palette of up to 256 colors, the size of an image can be reduced even further. In PNG, transparency can also be applied. In contrast to GIF, a separate alpha channel is used so that color pixels can also be partially transparent.
It took a long time for PNG to become a popular format within Web sites. This was partly because Microsoft's Web browser Internet Explorer did not correctly support the format for a long time. Since version 7, however, it has.
Animations are not possible within PNG. However, there are related file formats where this is possible, such as APNG.
