Sweet no identification of color space, gamma, and forced storage of the alpha channel. What a great format! /s<p>PNG is pretty stupid easy to parse and supports inline compression and multiple bit depths. If you want some uncompressed format that's easy to pipe and parse just use the NetPBM family.<p>Images are not just 2D arrays of pixels. There's extra data needed to tell the viewing system some of the image's provenance so it does so correctly.