
The Digital Materiality of GIFs - shashashasha
http://digitalmateriality.com/
======
LukeLambert
Over 60 MB of GIFs on that page according to DevTools. The Fight Club GIF
alone is 9 MB.

It's a terribly inefficient format, but I think a lack of free and open video
formats (and editing software) is partly to blame for its meteoric rise.

Also: video is harder to share and is typically recompressed on every upload,
reducing quality.

~~~
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/](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/](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/](https://ndarville.com/blog/2015/12/04/web-fonts/). It’s not directly
relevant to the aforementioned article. :)

------
ardf
>57 requests, 28,189.09 KB

I don't believe any new animated gifs should be made, except for animations
such as pixel art. They are inferior in every way to html video. The success
of webm on sites like 4chan are evidence that gifs offer no advantage in terms
of portability, ease of sharing, or features.

~~~
theseatoms
Except videos carry along with them the presumption of audio content.

~~~
manmal
Also, no auto-play (or at least, no inline display) on iOS.

~~~
mercer
That's a really big one for me. When I'm in 'silly consumption mode' I tend to
just avoid anything that opens up as a video. I really wish there was an
alternative to GIF for this use case though...

------
derefr
I've saved the .webm of a converted "gifv" video on Imgur before, then
reposted it to Tumblr. Works just fine—but the result doesn't _quite_ get the
same controls a Tumblr-converted gif does.

Really, sites just need to have a way to differentiate these types of video
uploads and treat them with looping-animation UX, rather than video UX.

An easy solution would be to come up with an alternate extension for saving
these videos, that other sites can recognize. This would be similar to, for
example, the way iTunes knows to treat an MP4 container as an audiobook if
it's an .m4b, or as a ringtone if it's an .m4r.

Another solution (and better, in my opinion) would be an extra
wrapper/container document format _around_ a video file, prepending at least a
new extra magic number to allow mime-type differentiation via libmagic. I'm
honestly surprised that "gifv" isn't already such a container-wrapper document
format. Note that such a format doesn't _need_ to be recognizable as a video
on your computer (although support probably would be added soon enough); it
just needs to be able to be reuploaded to other websites. (You could also add
an extra chunk to e.g. an MKV container that, when present, would change its
detected mime type—but this would restrict gifvs to only ever being MKVs.
Might not be a bad thing to standardize on a video container format.)

Of course, the solution that requires no community buy-in is to just come up
with a way to heuristically detect "silent short video file" on upload, and
treat anything that fits those criteria as an animation rather than a video.

------
tbirdz
>GIFS are a dumb, limited file format, and in the end this is why they are
important:

>They do not belong to anyone.

This may be true now, but for the majority of its lifetime GIF did not belong
to everyone, due to Unisys's patent on LZW.

~~~
eric_h
thank goodness for expiring patents.

------
sushisource
This site was most certainly not designed with a fullscreened browser on a 30"
monitor in mind

