the US DoD (Department of Defense) has adopted PNG as an official standard

Oh great, we can see some combat hardware in the latest and greatest imaging format.

Tell me something... Why have you and Starbucks brought up the Gimp v's Photoshop yarn when it's imaging we are (were) discussing. Perhaps it's one if your classic diversion tactics. The irrelevant thing here is one imaging programme being the bees knees, the fact I raised in respect of the popularity of GIF images is THEE entirely relevant issue. Sure, I only listed 20 sites but they represent a fair chunk of the world's page impressions which makes both the use and user-acceptance of GIF far far far far higher than that of PNG. For some reason you think I am bagging PNG - I'm not and have already said that at times I use it. But the facts speak for themselves, whatever site you visit the chances of a GIF image rather than PNG being displayed is enourmously high.

I am aware of the W3 endorsement of PNG, I refer to W3 when coding my own websites and recently finished one that complies strictly with XHTML1.1. Okay, that's no big deal - I'm just proving my awareness of the organisation itself. Having said that no standard is a standard until the specification becomes widely accepted in practice and with the representation of the humble PNG image on most websites, that is clearly not the case.

Now, if you want to keep spinning the yarn about freeware then visit their websites and see what imaging format they use, GIF isn't it? FreeBSD, Gimp, Linux.com, Apache, Samba, VNC, BitchX, Sendmail, SourceForge.net and OpenOffice... Yep, all of them.