The earliest animated GIFs were so crude that no serious web developer would consider using them. (That’s why it’s called an animated GIF instead, or a GIF animation.) But they are so useful for that one purpose that they’re now one of the most popular formats for images that will appear mainly on the internet. A GIF isn’t the same thing as a video - no audio, for starters. Today, though, we think of them primarily as short, looping animations. GIFs were well enough suited for their original purpose: displaying logos, line art, charts, and such on the web. One day, someone realized that if you put a series of images into a GIF and sequenced them properly, you would have a simple animation. Although the format was developed to display basic graphics, it can hold more than one image at a time. (In fact, GIFs were actually born two years before the World Wide Web.) As a relic of chat rooms, MySpace, and dial-up, they should have gone extinct long ago.īut this tech dinosaur is somehow more popular than ever, thanks to one thing: animation. The format was introduced by CompuServe back in 1987 - the digital Stone Age - to post simple graphics like stock market quotations. Although they can’t contain any audio, they can still be as bulky as an MP4 video file because they’re not compressed. The 8-bit format means they can only display 256 colors. And not necessarily an optimal one, at that. GIFs are really nothing but a type of image file. GIF - best pronounced like the peanut butter - stands for the Graphics Interchange Format.
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