As JPEG (Joint
photographic experts group), Portable Network Graphics also supports image
interlacing. This technique encodes the image in a way to allows the user
preview the image faster as it is being transfered.
PNG's two-dimensional
interlacing scheme is more complex to implement than GIF's line-wise
interlacing. It also costs a little more in file size. However, it yields
an initial image eight times faster than GIF (the first pass
transmits only 1/64th of the pixels, compared to 1/8th for GIF). Although
this initial image is coarse, it is useful in many situations. For
example, if the image is a World Wide Web imagemap that the user has seen
before, PNG's first pass is often enough to determine where to click. The
PNG scheme also looks better than GIF's, because horizontal and vertical
resolution never differ by more than a factor of two; this avoids the odd
"stretched" look seen when interlaced GIFs are filled in by replicating
scanlines. Preliminary results show that small text in an interlaced PNG
image is typically readable about twice as fast as in an equivalent GIF,
i.e., after PNG's fifth pass or 25% of the image data, instead of after
GIF's third pass or 50%. This is again due to PNG's more balanced increase
in resolution.