[oakwhiz]

The only issue with this kind of hack is that it uses a lot of bandwidth continuously, as long as the image exists. I wouldn't exactly consider GIF to be a good compression format for live streaming.

This might not be an issue for users on broadband internet connections, but on low bandwidth, metered cell phone networks, and congested Wifi networks, this could cause issues (such as slowdowns or unintentionally using up your metered bandwidth allocation) that wouldn't be nearly as bad if a piece of Javascript was used to live-update a page instead.

I wonder if it would be possible to make a live WebM version of this instead.

[akovaski]

If I read the source code correctly, this is not actually streaming something continuously; instead, it is making a 30-frame gif that has a start-time that is dependent on when you loaded the gif.

[witty_username]

Additionally, GIF has only 256 colors.

[geographomics]

Only 256 colours per frame, but they don't have to be the same ones, and can be combined to use a wider palette - for example: http://notes.tweakblogs.net/blog/8712/high-color-gif-images....