TABLE OF CONTENTS There are three graphic formats used on the Web, each with different properties and pros and cons. They are the graphics interchange format (GIF), pronounced like 'gift', but without the 't'; the joint photographic experts group (JPEG), pronounced 'jay-peg' and the portable network graphic (PNG), pronounced 'ping'.
GIF files have been around since the beginning of the Web and have a simple form of compression that means that if the images have large areas of plain color, then they will compress to quite a small size. The main issue with GIFs is that they can only be made out of 256 colors at the most, not full color (16 million). They can be less (in powers of two, like 4, 8, 16, 32, etc.), which helps the overall file size. Generally it is not usual to use GIFs for photographic images, as they can look poor quality and have a very large file size. They are more commonly used for graphic styles like cartoon.
There are a few versions of GIF files that allow other features. You can select a color to be invisible, usually the background, which can be handy for placing your buttons and images over backgrounds of different colors. Another version is the animated GIF, which as the name describes allows you to have multiple frames in a graphic. However, you should be wary of using this for large animations as there is no inter-frame compression, so a GIF with 100 frames in...
