[pessimism]

GIFs are so stupidly easy to use and distribute that I sometimes can’t wrap my head around how convenient the format is.

A while ago, I tried to be a good nerd and convert some GIFs to HTML5 video, and I crashed and burned pretty hard: https://ndarville.com/asides/webvideo/.

I gained a new appreciation of GIFs that day.

That said, it would be great if we got a compromise where browsers can load only the first frame of the GIF and play the reminder on click or touch to save all the loading and data—on both sides, really.

[pimlottc]

In the linked page, FOIT = "Flash of invisible text", when the user briefly sees empty space while the webfont is loading. I had to look that up.

https://css-tricks.com/fout-foit-foft/

[pessimism]

Oh yeah, that’s just quoted text from the original article, which deals with the phenomenon: https://ndarville.com/blog/2015/12/04/web-fonts/. It’s not directly relevant to the aforementioned article. :)

[arthurfm]

> That said, it would be great if we got a compromise

Wouldn't a better compromise be to support MP4/WebM videos in the IMG tag? Videos embedded this way could play without audio by default (just like GIFs).