@rick.theengineer: You think the difference between PNG and JPEG is transparency. It isn't. JPEG makes a file small by throwing pixels away. PNG makes it small by noticing that a photograph mostly repeats itself — and throws nothing away doing it. Neighbouring pixels are almost always similar, so instead of storing 145, 146, 149 you store 145, +1, +3. Then Huffman coding gives the common patterns short codes and the rare ones long codes. Everything on screen here is measured, not drawn. The zoom is real crops of one photo. The artifacts are real JPEG output at quality 8. And the pixels genuinely do read 145, 146, 149 — that's why I picked that photograph. #programming #softwareengineering #computerscience #coding #datacompression
