[X Newbies] jpegs, etc.

Florin Alexander Neumann alexn at ica.net
Wed May 14 08:40:22 PDT 2003


On Wednesday, May 14, 2003, at 10:14 Canada/Eastern, Jon Warms wrote:

> The standards group goes on to say in their faqs (quoted below), that 
> a de-facto jpeg standard _has_ emerged_ for internet use, and that, 
> Florin, is good enough for me and probably for most newbies as well.

Agreed. Yet, a de facto standard (JFIF) means that developers are not 
bound to follow it. Therefore, you may came across a JPEG file your 
graphic tools can't read -- and it's still JPEG, and the author is 
still entitled to call it that (e.g., HSI images, which, to my 
knowledge, no Mac app can handle). But I suppose it's academic and not 
worth the bandwidth to debate it.

> Though I have to again qualify my remarks with "in my experience", all 
> files I have encountered that claimed to be in jpeg formats were 
> readable by apps that claimed to read jpeg files.

I had a somewhat different experience. When I was still using Photoshop 
3 (while the world had moved to Photoshop 5), I was occasionally 
getting Photoshop JPEGs P3 couldn't handle. GraphicConverter usually 
saved the day.

My conclusion is that you should expect to read most JPEG files you 
come across. But, if it doesn't work, don't automatically assume 
there's something wrong with the file.

f



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