Internet lore: The great GIF debate | The Economist
▻http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/02/internet-lore #GIF #GIFs #format #image
The main question seems to be whether an acronym’s coiner has the right to determine its pronunciation. Most of the time, speakers are happy to defer to inventors. The PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format, designed to avoid patent and other disputes in the 1990s, stipulates in its specification document that its phonetic form is “ping”. Members of the Joint Photographic Experts Group, which spawned JPEG, have always insisted it be pronounced “jay-peg”. No one minds.
Except that JPEG is not the format’s proper name. In fact, the acronym refers to the compression algorithm, not the encapsulating file type, which is correctly known as JPEG Interchange Format. Or JIF.
