What is the difference between GIF and PNG image formats in terms of their application and technical characteristics?

GIF and PNG are image formats with different features:

• GIF supports animation and is limited to a palette of 256 colors, making it suitable for simple graphics, icons, and animated images. It uses lossless compression, but quality may suffer on complex images due to the limited palette.

• PNG supports a much larger number of colors (up to 16 million) and transparency with an alpha channel, making it ideal for static images with high quality and transparent backgrounds. PNG does not support animation (except for the extension APNG, which is not always supported).

Thus, GIF is chosen for animations and simple images with a limited palette, while PNG is used for high-quality static images with transparency.