[PaulHoule]

There was talk about upgrading PNG to support the equivalent of animated GIFs but it never really happened because of complexity, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-image_Network_Graphic...

As for color spaces that is a case where things get worse before they get better. In the 1990s I remember the horror of making images for the web with Photoshop because inevitably Photoshop would try some kind of color correction that would have been appropriate for print output but it ensured that the colors were wrong every time on the screen.

Today I am seeing my high color gamut screen as a problem rather than a solution because I like making red-cyan anaglyph images and found out that Windows makes (16,176,16) when I asked for (0,180,0) because it wants to save my eyes from the laser pointer green of the monitor by desaturating it to something that looks like sRGB green to my eyes, but looking through 3d glasses it means the right channel blends into the left channel. To get the level of control I need for this application it turns out I need to make both sRGB and high gamut images and display the right one... Which is a product of the complexity of display technology and how it gets exposed to developers.

[edflsafoiewq]

Animated PNGs eventually did quietly happen in the form of APNG.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG

[Jasper_]

> There was talk about upgrading PNG to support the equivalent of animated GIFs but it never really happened because of complexity

This was mostly due to overengineering on the part of the PNG committee. Why stop at animated PNGs, when we could support sound and interactivity! MNG is not a simple format, and the spec has MNG-LC ("low complexity") and MNG-VLC ("very low complexity") subsets, because the whole thing is too complex. Did you know you can embed JPEGs in MNGs? That it has synchronization points for sound, even though sound is still "coming at a later date"? That it allows pasting other images into the movie at arbitrary 2D transforms?

MNG's complexity is self-inflicted, because they second-system effect'd their way into features nobody wanted.

APNG, by contrast, is a series of PNG chunks with a couple extra fields on top for timing and control information.