[ardf]

>57 requests, 28,189.09 KB

I don't believe any new animated gifs should be made, except for animations such as pixel art. They are inferior in every way to html video. The success of webm on sites like 4chan are evidence that gifs offer no advantage in terms of portability, ease of sharing, or features.

[pjc50]

GIF represents a particular set of forced compromises: no audio, no controls, reasonably short, right-click-save-as available. The inefficiency of the file format also means people keep them dimensionally small.

HTML5 video doesn't have those constraints, and there isn't a separate type of "thing" which is an unobtrusive video. This isn't about the codec, but guaranteeing a way of presentation. Maybe if videos could be loaded into <IMG> tags with those constraints?

GIF also behaves a lot better than video when you have lots of them on a page.

[RubyPinch]

How are those constraints useful when they are completely decided by the website and not the user?

"but you could disable video so you don't have issues regarding videos or some similar strawman"

Well, that would be a bit extreme, and if we want to take that angle, sure, but then I should be allowed to take the angle of "if it can be disabled by default, then instead it could be muted and paused by default"

[chillingeffect]

Hehh heh: Did you only read the stats on loading the page :)

Seriously, the whole entire point of the page is that, yes, GIF is technologically inferior and therefore wanted by no one, and therefore, allows incredible freedom of expression!

That's information we can use to make better startups!

Instead of trying to own everything and start from scratch with the most efficient artifacts like file formats, try to leverage from "inferior" techniques in order to allow the user-generated content to flourish!!!! I'm glad someone posted this!

[ardf]

GIF is technologically inferior and therefore wanted by no one, and therefore, allows incredible freedom of expression

I suppose I'm being quite negative, but I don't see the logic in that statement. In what way does it allow more freedom? The biggest advantage I think gif has at the moment is familiarity.

[akavi]

The more constrained a medium is, the easier it is for an amateur to make something that's "good enough" to be shared publicly without shame. It's the creative equivalent of a blur filter on glamor shots. And wonderfully, you end up with creative output from people who often wouldn't dare to create otherwise.

See also: Vine, Minecraft, Twitter, Instagram (quite literally) etc.

[Grue3]

Because you can open any GIF in GIMP and edit it. Pixel by pixel. With videos you got what... Cinelerra? Blender? Try to get a normal person to use these.

[tbirdz]

You can dump all the frames from the video to images, edit the images in gimp, and combine the edited frames back together to make a new video.

[theseatoms]

Except videos carry along with them the presumption of audio content.

[detaro]

By whom? If you look at typical "image" hosters, you can't really tell outside of loading times if it is showing you a gif or a video. Are there browsers that do "clever" things with videos because they think there is audio?

[manmal]

Also, no auto-play (or at least, no inline display) on iOS.

[mercer]

That's a really big one for me. When I'm in 'silly consumption mode' I tend to just avoid anything that opens up as a video. I really wish there was an alternative to GIF for this use case though...

[arthurfm]

Instagram's Android app plays (MP4) videos [1] without audio by default. You just tap it to turn the audio on. I don't see why others couldn't do this?

[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/BA10BpWrbz9/

[xbryanx]

How exactly do you view a Webm on an iPhone?

[sotojuan]

You have to download the VLC app and open the WebM with it.