PNG (Portable Network Graphics) Specification, Version 1.1

For list of authors, see Credits.


Status of this Document

This is a revision of the PNG 1.0 specification, which has been published as RFC-2083 and as a W3C Recommendation. The revision has been released by the PNG Development Group but has not been approved by any standards body.

Abstract

This document describes PNG (Portable Network Graphics), an extensible file format for the lossless, portable, well-compressed storage of raster images. PNG provides a patent-free replacement for GIF and can also replace many common uses of TIFF. Indexed-color, grayscale, and truecolor images are supported, plus an optional alpha channel. Sample depths range from 1 to 16 bits.

PNG is designed to work well in online viewing applications, such as the World Wide Web, so it is fully streamable with a progressive display option. PNG is robust, providing both full file integrity checking and simple detection of common transmission errors. Also, PNG can store gamma and chromaticity data for improved color matching on heterogeneous platforms.

This specification defines the Internet Media Type "image/png".


Reading this document

If "231" looks the same as the number "231" instead of 2 raised to the power 31, your viewer is not recognizing the HTML-4.0 SUP tag; you need to look at the HTML 2.0, ASCII text, or PostScript version of this document instead.

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