
Hey Ho, GIFs Must Go (1999) - gscott
https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/citation/wc991103.htm
======
dredmorbius
The key lesson here is not about a specific image format or company, but the
fact that even a _very_ light assertion _or even hint_ of proprietary
restrictions can kill or handicap a nascent technology or protocol in the bud.

The age of early hypertext was awash in such cases. The University of
Minnesota only mentioned that they _might_ introduce a charge for gopher
servers, effectively killing the protocol. Various early conferencing and
hypertext systems, including one from Sun Microsystems (NEWS?), and a few
models from Microsoft, existed. Somewhere, Tim O'Reilly has commented about
the early days of O'Reilly & Associates where he was looking at various
options and made the early decision to _not_ get locked into any one
proprietary system, a choice which has paid handsomly.

The whole phenomenon of prortocol creation, promotion, evolution, and quite
often, stagnation, is a fascinating and understudied one IMO. The role of non-
market players, particularly government standards organisations, the military,
and academic fields, is extraordinarily underappreciated.

~~~
jackpirate
_The key lesson here is not about a specific image format or company, but the
fact that even a very light assertion or even hint of proprietary restrictions
can kill or handicap a nascent technology or protocol in the bud._

Is it? Gifs have been wildly successful. Today, many web deverlopers prefer
newer formats like png for both technical and philosophical reasons, but gifs
continue to make up a huge fraction of internet pictures. The average 12 year
old knows what a gif is.

~~~
dredmorbius
Also: because gifs are so predominantly used for animations and _not_ static
images, I've taken to using a client-side CSS style that renders all gifs as
transparent, unless specifically hovered over.

This _very rarely_ affects anything other than animations. People simply
aren't using gifs for images as a matter of course today. For photos, it's
largely jpeg (vastly higher compression, though lossy), for text-based images,
png, though SVG is making inroads, particularly for data visualisations.

------
chungy
More of a historic curiosity these days, the legal reasons to avoid GIFs 20
years ago don't exist anymore, the LZW patents have expired.

That being said, PNG always had much stronger compression, in addition to
supporting 24- and 32-bit color. Nowadays, we even have WebP that usually
compresses better than PNG, and compresses far, far better than animated GIF.
Animated GIF is a pretty ugly hack to the format, very inefficient for many
common kinds of animations (or full-blown video as it's often used now); I've
found that animated WebP can produce files around 10% the size of GIFs.

~~~
grenoire
WebP is lossy though, no? The whole point of PNG is preserving the exact pixel
data.

~~~
chungy
WebP has lossy and lossless modes. The latter should be considered as the PNG
replacement :)

~~~
lazyjeff
WebP should be replacing JPEG and PNG. I feel like JPEG/PNG is like the GIF of
1999, formats which can be completely replaced with no real drawbacks. The
disk space and network savings alone could reduce energy consumption. Safari
is the only browser without WebP support, and I don't think it makes sense to
keep waiting on them. If Safari users start seeing websites with images that
don't load, Apple will support WebP real quick.

One thing that would be nice would be a way to tell whether a WebP is lossy
(in which case you should only edit/resize the original file, to prevent
degradation), or lossless (edit as much as you please).

~~~
biddlesby
It's wishful thinking that it would reduce energy consumption! If the format
is more efficient people will just load more.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Jevons Paradox:

 _In economics, the Jevons paradox ( /ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect)
occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the
efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for
any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to
increasing demand._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox)

------
danso
> _In 1984 the writer Stewart Brand observed that "Information wants to be
> free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free
> because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine -- too
> cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably
> valuable to the recipient." The result, he said, is a tension that "will not
> go away."_

Information is so incredibly cheap to distribute and copy today that I forget
it was still very cheap to do so even before the Internet.

~~~
dredmorbius
The concept, if not the wording, pre-dates Brand, going back to Michael
Polanyi, Norbert Wiener, and others (1940s - 1960s).

------
rbx
Many times if GIF is converted to video it will ruin the pixel art, or in some
cases even produce bigger file [1]. I get the efficiency argument for
conversion to video, but in some cases it is a no-go. There should always be
an option to not convert to video.

[1]
[https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/6403](https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/6403)

~~~
azinman2
This article is less about GIFs being animated memes today and more about
being the standard (at one time) way to send images between computers.

------
mmahemoff
What people call GIFs (however they pronounce it!) are nowadays more likely to
be delivered as video files in reality.

It's more of a human-centric label for "short+looping+silent+autoplay video"
than a tech-centric file format. A tad ironic given there's no longer a patent
issue on the actual format.

~~~
pokstad
There should just be a video format called "loopies" that just wrap an
existing format with these qualities.

~~~
hombre_fatal
Already exists: gifv

[https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/208606616-What-
is-G...](https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/208606616-What-is-GIFV-)

Nothing on imgur.com's homepage is a gif, for example. Same with gfycat.com.

~~~
swebs
There is no such thing as a gifv file. Imgur just names the file that way when
serving standard mp4 videos. Any device capable of playing mp4 files can view
them. The whole thing is a marketing ploy.

~~~
zzo38computer
I have seen that. However, I have found that if you delete the "v" at the end
of the URL then you will just get a animated GIF file which you can view with
any program that supports animated GIF.

------
harry8
Anyone have an estimate of how much revenue increase the patent office
received as a result of allowing software patents while knowing nothing at
all, whatsoever about software?

How many of the things have been granted? How many filed? How much are the
filing fees? How much are typical lawyering fees for it.

There are many among us who feel it is the actions of pure parasites on
genuine tech innovation in software and systems so it's a question of how much
was gouged by that decision (intentionally or otherwise).

The other one that could be interesting to know is the descriptive stats on
salaries for patent attourneys specialising in software vs people being paid
to program software.

------
kuiooullkre
Because browsers are now disabling autoplay even for silent videos, GIFs are
going to be with us for at least another 10 years.

~~~
karmakaze
There's no rational reason why a browser should autoplay a GIF and not a
silent video.

~~~
Thorrez
There are a lot of people asking to disable autoplay even on silent videos.
The main reason is they want to save bandwidth.

[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=514102](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=514102)

~~~
sp332
Firefox Nightly supports this and I use it. It's not perfect but overall I'd
say it's better than letting videos autoplay.

------
leeoniya
for certain types of content i still prefer gifs (e.g. pixel art).

i've written a couple libs that help record canvas pixel art to gifs.

[https://github.com/leeoniya/RgbQuant.js/](https://github.com/leeoniya/RgbQuant.js/)

[https://github.com/leeoniya/GIFter.js](https://github.com/leeoniya/GIFter.js)

btw, always compress with
[https://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/](https://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/) it's amazing.

------
rbx
with GIF i can easily right click it and do a similar image search. Does
something like this exist for video?

------
thrower123
I'm not sure I've seen a whole lot of GIFs in the wild lately - mostly they
seem to be getting converted to mp4 on the fly by most of the hosting
services, no?

------
cloudking
GIFs will be around for a simple reason: memes

It's the only format that works pretty much everywhere on every platform

~~~
zamadatix
Most meme "gifs" are actually being delivered as video data these days.

~~~
whywhywhywhy
And it completely falls apart sometime. GIFs actually work but try browsing
Reddit’s video alternative to GIFs anywhere outside of the reddit office and
it struggles to even play for a second.

We have engineers replacing tech that works with their half baked barley
functioning versions that lose all the benefits of sharing and remixability of
a GIF file.

~~~
catalogia
I don't understand what you're saying. I'm sure the video files reddit serves
are perfectly playable in standard video players, since web browsers can
obviously handle them. If download bandwidth is the concern, you should know
it would be even worse with gif files, which are much larger than visually
equivalent animated gifs. If reddit were serving up real gifs, they would load
even slower.

Video files are easier to share, on account of being smaller, and easier to
edit since you can use real video editing tools which is a lot easier than
editing a gif frame by frame in gimp.

The only sense in which gifs are superior is they're easier to write a
parser/renderer for from scratch, but I think that's relevant to virtually
nobody.

~~~
jodrellblank
Gif: loads (slowly); plays.

Video: loads video player controls (slowly); waits; doesn’t start playing;
starts playing but doesn’t let me choose volume quickly enough; stops playing;
loading; jumps several seconds; appears to be at the end but isn’t finished
loading; won’t loop; try to rewind or jump to position; doesn’t work; UI
controls appear to have disconnected from anything; can’t rewind replay or
watch; get annoyed; reload page entirely or quit it.

This is where you dismiss everything I’ve written with an “it doesn’t happen”
because “you’re sure” videos are “perfectly playable” and “obviously work”,
but you’re wrong, they don’t, they have glaring huge UX failure modes I hit
all the time for years on mobile Safari with a normal person not mega fast
internet connection.

~~~
catalogia
None of that is the format, it sounds like your media player (or whatever js
webshit reddit has implemented in their abominable redesign...) is just shit.
"Mega-fast" internet would benefit you more for gifs than it would for real
video formats, on account of those gifs being larger. Why do you think reddit
wants to serve you video files instead of gifs? They're not doing it to fuck
with you, I promise. They do it because it saves them bandwidth, and therefore
it saves _you_ bandwidth too. The solution to your problems is not using an
obsolete _inefficient_ image format for video; rather the solution to your
problems is getting software that isn't totally broken.

Since your so skeptical, let's put some numbers to it: Here is a gif:
[https://0x0.st/zY8f.gif](https://0x0.st/zY8f.gif) It's a staggering[0] 3.5MB,
on a 56kbps connection it would take you over eight minutes to download it. I
uploaded this gif to imgur, who then converted it into this mp4:
[https://0x0.st/zY8O.mp4](https://0x0.st/zY8O.mp4) It's less than 700KB. On a
56kbps connection it would take you less than two minutes to download this.
This is not an atypical example, an order of magnitude improvement is pretty
typical when converting gif "videos" into real video formats.

Eight minutes vs two minutes... you tell me, which is faster? The faster your
internet connection gets the narrower the gap gets, which is opposite of the
trend you're suggesting. _These conversions benefit people with slow internet
more than they benefit those with fast internet._

[0] (For shits and giggles, I also encoded a VP9 webm with ffmpeg:
[https://0x0.st/zY8v.webm](https://0x0.st/zY8v.webm) From what I understand
you cannot play this on your iphone (because Apple), but it's less than a
tenth the size of the original gif and looks identical to my eye.)

~~~
whywhywhywhy
> None of that is the format, it sounds like your media player (or whatever js
> webs __t reddit has implemented in their abominable redesign...) is just s
> __t.

Re-read my comment this was exactly my point. We swapped something that worked
everywhere for a custom players on every site and re-encoding therefore
destroying what the artist intended.

------
tinus_hn
So strange how Unisys caused al these problems but I doubt it made them much
money.

------
thanatropism
GIFs are short, silent looping videos that work nothing like videos in
consumer appliances have ever worked: they don't have pause, rewind or fast-
forward controls; part of the effect is that on the first run they tend to run
in slow-mo as they progressively download and subsequently run snappy, at
times startlingly so.

No technical committee or even loose-consensus-running-code working group
would ever come up with anything like that. The mode of pop-culture remixing
that GIFs epitomize could never have been anticipated; the value that
defaulting to silence delivers has still not gotten through to news sites
(good ones, too!) that autoplay talking video over your headphones or god
forbid the open plan office; it's even been reported[0] that porn works better
for women in GIF mode.

That's because GIFs were never conceived for video. Consumer computer video
was never conceived for pop culture remixing (despite having the experience of
turntables to pick from). Porn was never conceived for women, for that matter.

GIFs are legacy left for us from a time between the fall of the Berlin Wall
and the erection of the EU castle when everyone expected planning and
bureaucracy to lose out to spontaneity bordering on anarchy. Many important HN
recurring themes are here: privacy vs. normalized surveillance, free speech x
hate speech x rogue counter-establishment right-wing speech, the freaking Mac
App Store. Every "hacker" that defaults to the safe repressive position is
someone who would rather that GIF looked that those barely-working WebM or
whatever embeds found on Wikipedia, with little transport controls,
bureaucratic efficiency and that wrongthink GIF memes were somehow blocked by
"good DRM, DRM that prevents Putin from attacking the system".

Which system? The one that brought us Medium.com when we used to have
Geocities. But we'll always have GIFs.

[0] [https://www.glamour.com/story/porn-gifs-
tumblr](https://www.glamour.com/story/porn-gifs-tumblr)

~~~
azinman2
Actually GIFs were originally mainly for still image transfer — that they had
more than 5 frames of animation is a recent phenomenon due to rising data
transfer rates.

All this pop culture stuff comes over a decade from when the GIF was invented.

