PNG or GIF?

I have absolutely no idea where to ask this question, so I've come here for help. I like to make sprites, but I've been saving all of them in the GIF format. It has come to my attention that PNG can also do transparencies and animations, but I can only save my animations in GIF anyway (I use Jasc Animation Shop). If this is all painfully obvious to you guys, I'll just say sorry in advance, but I've just had to learn as I go.

Anyway, I have tested both formats out, but the only difference seems to be file size. Which format is best for saving transparencies? I've tried to read up on the differences, but every single god damn article is in crazy nerd talk, so it tends to go over my head at times. I hope someone might respond here.

>>15
You can quote stuff with a single greater-than sign followed by a space, then the text you want to quote (without line breaks).

10-20% often isn't much of a big difference, no.
Not for my pet's home page, for sure, but I make bread with this.

For the type of graphics I'm arguing that GIF is useful for (no transparency, 256 colour) it's doubtful you're going to have anything large enough for the PNG compression to mean anything
Some 100 images from different parts of a portal, saving enough  bandwidth (size * number of downloads) to care. For once, for one fucking time, the widely-supported standard supports the best compression. Bloody hell, why don't take advantage of about the only most-efficient-in-its-class standard in the world? (Note: I'm aware that there are even better solutions than PNG for some cases of lossless compression, but they are not free so they are out of the question.)

the second you put a photo JPEG
JPEG is out of the question as it lossy. What you want in JPEG you don't want in GIF/PNG, and what you want in GIF/PNG you don't want in JPEG unless you want it to look like utter shit blocky grainy DCTed crap.

As for blocking MSIE idiots, I'd gladly do that on personal stuff (or at least, include an extra HA HA ENJOY YOUR MALWARE banner), but not when I'm getting paid. And part of my job is getting stuff to work with MSIE, so in a way, I profit from it, even if it's not the most pleasuring part of the job.