My guess is as a drop-in replacement for GIF; use the <img> element instead of the more complicated <video> element, an inherent lack of audio, no need to speci

My guess is as a drop-in replacement for GIF; use the <img> element instead of the more complicated <video> element, an inherent lack of audio, no need to specify looping or lack of video controls, etc. I think Safari already supports using at least one actual video format as the `src` in an <img> element but it's weird to do so.