Sure it’s smart and well thought-out. It’s not worth the Nobel prize though.
The achievement in PNG is in beating the de facto standard when it was created, GIF. That’s pretty difficult because GIF is almost good enough, except for features that are hard to explain to non technical people. They don’t care that GIF was covered by software patents and they don’t know about 1 bit transparency and color palettes. They know that GIF is supported in all software they care about, and that GIF has animation to boot.
The achievement in PNG is in beating the de facto standard when it was created, GIF. That’s pretty difficult because GIF is almost good enough, except for features that are hard to explain to non technical people. They don’t care that GIF was covered by software patents and they don’t know about 1 bit transparency and color palettes. They know that GIF is supported in all software they care about, and that GIF has animation to boot.