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If enough people are looking for a way to create APNGs--that is, if there's demand for authoring tools--then the people who produce the authoring software will be incentivized to add support for the format on their own. At first, it won't matter that it's difficult to create APNGs; like animated GIFs, one of the core strengths of APNG, given cross-browser support, is that they're inherently viral--you just right-click-save one to your desktop, and then you can stick it into any other app that expects an image (upload them to Imgur, drop them into Tumblr, use them as emoticons in a message in Gmail...) and they'll "just work." The majority of people won't be authoring APNGs--just like the majority of people aren't authoring animated GIFs. Instead, most people will just be taking and resharing other people's APNGs. It could take a half-hour with ImageMagick to generate a valid APNG and it wouldn't matter, as long as you can take "translucent_pusheen_dance.png", stick it on your blog, and have it loop its cute little animation in full 32-bit RGBA glory. As long as the original creator of the animation decided they would be better-served creating an APNG than an animated GIF, then everyone else will share and spread that APNG. But only if they can see it in their browsers, of course. The original creator won't care about the hassle of creating APNGs--we go through lots of hassles, as web-developers, to get things into arcane formats (e.g. spritesheets) so that clients can experience them slightly better. The content author's only consideration will be how many people can successfully see it, vs. what the quality of the thing they'll be seeing is. As soon as APNG can be seen in every browser animated GIFs work in, it'll be equal on one criteria, and beat GIFs hands-down on the other. But not until then. |