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Was the original focus on size or performance for animated GIFs? The more you compress something, generally the more processing is required to restore it. I sta

Was the original focus on size or performance for animated GIFs? The more you compress something, generally the more processing is required to restore it. I started using the web in the mid 90s, and animated GIFs were everywhere.

Enginerrrd 7y ago
At the data rates we had available in the 90's, size was performance over the internet. I am absolutely incredulous that people choose to use a GIF over a proper video format to share video on places like Reddit in this day and age. I don't understand the motivation to do so.
- phkahler 7y ago
  Because it's a "gif" not a WebP. If you want a format to catch on, the language needs to roll off the tongue. Even though I hate the word "podcast" and it sounds apple specific even though it's not, it sound a lot better than WebP.
  - geofft 7y ago
    "Do I look like I know what a JPEG is? I just want a picture of a got-dang hot dog." https://youtu.be/QEzhxP-pdos https://youtu.be/QEzhxP-pdos
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  Well, these days imgur/gfycat will encode your gif as a video. Not sure I even see gifs much anymore. Also, where have you been able to casually upload video to share quick bites like a cat making a funny face? You aren't going to upload a 12 second silent video to youtube. Up until very recently, gifs were the only permissible way to share this sort of content.
- cm2012 7y ago
  Because gifs can't have volume. I don't want my phone to make noises when I'm browsing the web.
  - bredren 7y ago
    There is also still generally more broadly supported preview rendering of gif vs newer formats. Also probably more addressable / available tools for anim gif creation.
    - caro_douglos 7y ago
      Signal messenger doesn’t support webp across devices (last time I checked)....so I use jiffy format
  - harshreality 7y ago
    Then your browser should have an option to mute-embedded-video-by-default. Problem solved. Don't blame a web video format/standard for UI failures.
    - coribuci 7y ago
      > Then your browser should have an option to mute-embedded-video-by-default. Problem solved. I think you don't understand the modern web. If something is crappy the user shall have it. JS was always considered crappy but now is the best new thing. And you also missed tbe latest web/UI/UX development. From the web designer point of view the user is an idiot which must be punished for every attempt to customize something. > Don't blame a web video format/standard for UI failures. They are not UI failures. They are done on purpose.
- pjc50 7y ago
  The huge advantage of gif was that it went in the <IMG> element. It behaves like a picture that moves, and can be uploaded to picture hosting services. Video, until maybe the last 5 years, didn't.
  - gsich 7y ago
    It still doesn't. No loop control. Yeah you have HTML tags and whatnot, but the loop info must be inside the video itself, not as external metadata.
  - edflsafoiewq 7y ago
    Github is still full of GIFs for exactly this reason.
nemo 7y ago
Pretty sure the original focus was just getting something that worked to display an animation. Animated gifs are an archaic, inefficient video format. Each frame of video is included in the file. You can optimize with a global color table and a few tricks to help cut size but they're incredibly inefficient compared to modern alternatives. Bigger sites like Twitter/Facebook convert gifs to .mp4s and serve .mp4 where possible since it saves a lot of bandwidth.
- ISL 7y ago
  I suspect the key to the explosion of animated gifs was that everything supported gif and that it was largely incapable of nefarious/annoying activity (unlike flash).
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    There's a fair bit of annoyance possible with GIFs, a fact I exploited when Google+ decided to: 1. Allow animations in the "Hero" user profile image. 2. Make that image permanently fixed to the top of the screen on the profile page. 3. As users increased window size to see more text and less hero, the image would scale to as much as 3/4 of the screen. 4. The hero was included on the "hover card" for users and would show up in all kinds of locations throughout the service. I still have that collection.... I spent an hour or so researching "annoying gifs", and settled on a rapid red-green-blue stroboscopic rotation. I don't know the cycle time, but it was probably a few times per second. Google eventually relented. Well, they eventually shitcanned the whole site, but that's another story. Trying to find animated images that weren't mind-bendingly annoying to me is how I ended up with the "space alien cat" image and avatar. The original had a rotating set of astronomical images in the glasses, I eventually applied the Crab Nebula as a static fill (tried the Cat's Eye, but ironically, it didn't work particularly well). That's the hero I use at several sites (Ello, Mastodon), and is the inspiration to the avatar I use as well. Later at another site at which gratuitous annoying gif use was prevalent, I found a few static-but-apparently-moving optical illusion images, again to make the point that annoying images are annoying. The point was somehow missed by that crowd. That site also died. TL;DR: animated gifs and even static images can be plenty annoying.
- 7y ago
buckminster 7y ago
I got the impression from the spec that it was originally designed to support retaining the compression dictionary across frames, which would have produced much smaller files at no cost to the decoder. But this wasn't explicit, it didn't get implemented, and the second spec ruled it out. It could have very easily been better. I'm not sure what the moral is.

Enginerrrd 7y ago

At the data rates we had available in the 90's, size was performance over the internet. I am absolutely incredulous that people choose to use a GIF over a proper video format to share video on places like Reddit in this day and age. I don't understand the motivation to do so.

phkahler 7y ago
Because it's a "gif" not a WebP. If you want a format to catch on, the language needs to roll off the tongue. Even though I hate the word "podcast" and it sounds apple specific even though it's not, it sound a lot better than WebP.
- geofft 7y ago
  "Do I look like I know what a JPEG is? I just want a picture of a got-dang hot dog." https://youtu.be/QEzhxP-pdos https://youtu.be/QEzhxP-pdos
hombre_fatal 7y ago
Well, these days imgur/gfycat will encode your gif as a video. Not sure I even see gifs much anymore. Also, where have you been able to casually upload video to share quick bites like a cat making a funny face? You aren't going to upload a 12 second silent video to youtube. Up until very recently, gifs were the only permissible way to share this sort of content.
cm2012 7y ago
Because gifs can't have volume. I don't want my phone to make noises when I'm browsing the web.
- bredren 7y ago
  There is also still generally more broadly supported preview rendering of gif vs newer formats. Also probably more addressable / available tools for anim gif creation.
  - caro_douglos 7y ago
    Signal messenger doesn’t support webp across devices (last time I checked)....so I use jiffy format
- harshreality 7y ago
  Then your browser should have an option to mute-embedded-video-by-default. Problem solved. Don't blame a web video format/standard for UI failures.
  - coribuci 7y ago
    > Then your browser should have an option to mute-embedded-video-by-default. Problem solved. I think you don't understand the modern web. If something is crappy the user shall have it. JS was always considered crappy but now is the best new thing. And you also missed tbe latest web/UI/UX development. From the web designer point of view the user is an idiot which must be punished for every attempt to customize something. > Don't blame a web video format/standard for UI failures. They are not UI failures. They are done on purpose.
pjc50 7y ago
The huge advantage of gif was that it went in the <IMG> element. It behaves like a picture that moves, and can be uploaded to picture hosting services. Video, until maybe the last 5 years, didn't.
- gsich 7y ago
  It still doesn't. No loop control. Yeah you have HTML tags and whatnot, but the loop info must be inside the video itself, not as external metadata.
- edflsafoiewq 7y ago
  Github is still full of GIFs for exactly this reason.

nemo 7y ago

Pretty sure the original focus was just getting something that worked to display an animation. Animated gifs are an archaic, inefficient video format. Each frame of video is included in the file. You can optimize with a global color table and a few tricks to help cut size but they're incredibly inefficient compared to modern alternatives. Bigger sites like Twitter/Facebook convert gifs to .mp4s and serve .mp4 where possible since it saves a lot of bandwidth.

ISL 7y ago
I suspect the key to the explosion of animated gifs was that everything supported gif and that it was largely incapable of nefarious/annoying activity (unlike flash).
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  There's a fair bit of annoyance possible with GIFs, a fact I exploited when Google+ decided to: 1. Allow animations in the "Hero" user profile image. 2. Make that image permanently fixed to the top of the screen on the profile page. 3. As users increased window size to see more text and less hero, the image would scale to as much as 3/4 of the screen. 4. The hero was included on the "hover card" for users and would show up in all kinds of locations throughout the service. I still have that collection.... I spent an hour or so researching "annoying gifs", and settled on a rapid red-green-blue stroboscopic rotation. I don't know the cycle time, but it was probably a few times per second. Google eventually relented. Well, they eventually shitcanned the whole site, but that's another story. Trying to find animated images that weren't mind-bendingly annoying to me is how I ended up with the "space alien cat" image and avatar. The original had a rotating set of astronomical images in the glasses, I eventually applied the Crab Nebula as a static fill (tried the Cat's Eye, but ironically, it didn't work particularly well). That's the hero I use at several sites (Ello, Mastodon), and is the inspiration to the avatar I use as well. Later at another site at which gratuitous annoying gif use was prevalent, I found a few static-but-apparently-moving optical illusion images, again to make the point that annoying images are annoying. The point was somehow missed by that crowd. That site also died. TL;DR: animated gifs and even static images can be plenty annoying.
7y ago

buckminster 7y ago

I got the impression from the spec that it was originally designed to support retaining the compression dictionary across frames, which would have produced much smaller files at no cost to the decoder. But this wasn't explicit, it didn't get implemented, and the second spec ruled it out. It could have very easily been better. I'm not sure what the moral is.