Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!att!pacbell.com!ucsd!sdd.hp.com!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!aplcen!boingo.med.jhu.edu!dave
From: dave@boingo.med.jhu.edu (David Heath)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Displaying GIF pictures under X windows
Message-ID: <1990Nov29.031653.28066@boingo.med.jhu.edu>
Date: 29 Nov 90 03:16:53 GMT
References: <9011272103.AA28540@test4>
Organization: The Johns Hopkins Hospital-Body CT Imaging Lab
Lines: 22

jimf@SABER.COM writes:

>|There are at least two tools to  achieve this goal:  Try xloadimage or
>|xgif  (now  xv).   They   should  be   available  at  any  archive  of
>|comp.sources.x. xv is being posted two months ago, xloadimage nearly 5
>|months ago.

>Xloadimage does not yet support 89a, only 87a.  I haven't had time to
>try adding support for 89a (probably won't have time in the near
>future unless someone does it for me).

From reading the compuserv GIF documentation, I was under the impression
the GIF standard was meant to be easily extensible. Software written for
old versions of the standard would just ignore blocks that they didn't
understand. If this is so, they WHY do so many programmers who write
GIF readers insist on checking for "GIF87a" in the header? This seems
incredibly short sighted to me.

If there is a good reason for this, I would like to hear it.

-dave heath
dave@boingo.med.jhu.edu