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Stephen Wilhite, creator of the GIF, has died
- jka 5y agoStephen's obituary from the article is available here: https://www.megiefuneralhome.com/obituaries/?obId=24311617 https://www.megiefuneralhome.com/obituaries/?obId=24311617 A credit from there, not mentioned in the article, is that at one time he was chief architect of America Online (AOL).
- throw_m239339 5y agoRIP. Was there ever a widely adopted alternative to GIF in the browser for animated pictures (like PNG is to JPEG)? Or is using video formats in place of GIF made a replacement irrelevant?
- rainsil 5y agoWebP images support animation, and they're fully supported in Chromium and Firefox[0], but Safari support seems flaky[1] [0]: https://caniuse.com/webp https://caniuse.com/webp [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68522707/animated-webp-frames-get-cropped-by-safari-seen-on-ios-14-7 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68522707/animated-webp-f...
- WalterGR 5y agoAnimated Portable Network Graphics (APNG) has broad browser and tooling support. (Which surprised me. I knew of the format but didn’t know that it has become viable…) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG
- dangus 5y agoThe latter. Looping video is the replacement.
- gaudat 5y agoThis. I think Imgur has been using "gifv" which is just WebM. Imageboards that used to accept GIF only now also accepts WebM. Telegram's "GIF"s are actually H.264 MP4s without an audio track. And I think Lottie or SVG may be a viable replacement to SWF movies. Sadly there is no software working with these formats that is as user-friendly as old-school Flash.
- qbasic_forever 5y agoMJPG aka motion jpeg is just a stream of static jpeg images IIRC. You see it a lot from cheap IP cameras and browsers don't have any trouble rendering it as an animated image.
- ratdragon 5y agoF
- bitemix 5y agoLooks like he lived a full life. Not to be too crass, but... is it pronounced "Stefen" or "Steven"?
- qiskit 5y agoIn honor of stephen wilhite, though I am an ardent proponent of pronouncing gif with a hard g sound, I'll pronounce it as "jif" for the rest of the week.
- philg_jr 5y agoChoosy developers choose gif!
- jedberg 5y agoIf you want to see the most crass but hilarious thread, here is the reddit thread about this: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/tlcm6r/stephen_wilhite_creator_of_the_gif_has_died/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/tlcm6r/stephen_... It's got some pretty good g/j jokes in there.