DDSN 360: Glossary 8

Digitization is certainly challenging the old ways of doing things, whether that’s in publishing or politics. But it’s not the end. In many ways, it is just the beginning.

— Heather Brooke

User Interface Design – Fall 2019

Glossary 8

• JPG: (or JPEG) stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. It is a compressed digital image format established by the aforementioned group.
• GIF: stands for Graphics Interchange Format, and it was created by developer Steve Wilhite in 1987 at CompuServ. This format allows for image size reduction without the loss of quality. In 2019 “GIF” is a household term, and shared on the Web billions of times a day. There has been a long standing debate, even since its creation, regarding the pronunciation of the acronym, between using a soft or hard “g” sound.
• PNG: stands for Portable Network Graphics. This is an image file type that supports lossless data compression.
• Lossy Compression: This is also known as irreversible compression and it is a type of data encoding that uses approximation and partial data discarding to make files more transferable.
• Progressive Image: A progressive image is a file that loads in progressive waves so it can load faster, rather than all at once, which can take longer.
• Dithering: Dithering is using a limited color palette on an image, but which uses more universal colors that more widely used screens can interpret.
• 8-bit color: 8-bit color graphics are a way that image data is stored. Each pixel is stored as one 8-bit byte.
• Hexadecimal: Hexadecimal is a numeral system made up of 16 symbols. The symbols are the decimal symbols plus six extra symbols.
• Transparency Matte: A channel that determines the transparency of an image, or section of an image.
• Image Map: An image map allows you, in web coding, to identify different parts of an image as different links.