[wolrah]

> What is more wacky is why gifs returned to fashion at all. They were dead for nearly a decade after people stopped doing their own web sites, and used gifs for things like animated "under construction" signs.

Same reason that H.264 won the web video standards war: mobile.

While mobile browsers can now embed videos reliably that wasn't always the case, and if there's one thing mobile users hate it's links opening other apps. GIFs allowed "video" content to be displayed inline easily in a mostly universal fashion.