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From: jejones@mcrware.UUCP (James Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.m6809
Subject: Re: Proposal for Graphics Format Std.
Message-ID: <552@mcrware.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 11-Nov-87 06:07:28 EST
Article-I.D.: mcrware.552
Posted: Wed Nov 11 06:07:28 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 14-Nov-87 06:49:27 EST
References: <2117@lsuc.UUCP> <1138@wlbr.EATON.COM>
Distribution: na
Organization: Microware Systems Corp., Des Moines, Ia.
Lines: 24
Summary: GIF is machine-independent, but...

In article <1138@wlbr.EATON.COM>, pete@wlbr.EATON.COM (Pete Lyall) writes:
> Uh Jim - the CIS folks have a rather versatile standard for graphics
> interchange that was released earlier this year. It's called GIF,
> which is short for GRAPHICS INTERCHANGE FORMAT. It has no practical
> limitations of resolution, number of colors, or whatever. It is
> machine independent (many popular machines have GIF viewers available
> in the public domain), and the files are compressed.

Well...GIF *is* machine-independent, and I appreciate Mike Dziedzic's work,
but--machine-independence doesn't look like it's coming out to mean that
you can display *any* GIF picture using, for example, gifos9.  gifos9 can't
handle GIF files with more than sixteen colors.  I can understand why this
is the case (we're talking a two-pass algorithm to boil down a 256-color
GIF file to sixteen colors; presumably you'd keep some kind of 3-D histogram
in RGB space and figure out where "most" of the pixels went so you could
minimize the error when you pick the sixteen colors you'll use), but that
nevertheless takes the glitter off the "machine-independent" label unless
someone does write that conversion program.

The other thing is--when you say "public domain," do you mean that the
source is available?  I for one haven't seen hide nor hair of the source
to gifos9 available for download.

		James Jones