CompuServe Messages

[Continued from previous message] the patterns happen to duplicate at 8 bit intervals, which they usually don't. The variable code size encoding used by GIF allows any and all repeating bit patterns to compress accordingly. This is much more effective than the "standard" LZW scheme. It would be difficult to come up with a better scheme which would still retain 100% of the data. (Huffman encoding is the only real alternative to the LZ derivitives, and it isn't anywhere near as effective as the GIF compression has been…) Sorry to go on a bit about that, but it needed some explaining… –>Steve Bennett