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Animation and video are different things. Here's an animated GIF used for animation: http://i.imgur.com/rwUt664.gif Here's an animated GIF used for video: https://mediacru.sh/demo Obviously, in the video case, a real video format wins, and if social networks let us upload videos with the same filesize cap they allowed for images, you'd start to see short videos used in place of GIFs.[1] However, in the animation case, video-encoding wouldn't even work--videos don't have alpha-layers, after all. In this case, animated GIFs are currently the only solution--and APNGs would be a decided improvement. --- [1] This has only just become possible for video formats, though, so some latency in implementing a policy change like this is to be expected. Until recently "video on the web" meant Flash, and Flash content didn't have any of the viral properties of images; you couldn't just right-click a Flash <embed> to save the FLV from it, then upload it somewhere else and expect it to work. We do have that now with HTML5 <video> elements, but they're still pretty rare, and as long as there isn't a place to take the tiny-little-video-files from, nobody will have them to re-upload them to anywhere else. |
