
An Honor for the Creator of the GIF - fjordan
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/an-honor-for-the-creator-of-the-gif/?smid=tw-nytimes
======
NelsonMinar
As everyone knows, GIF stands for "Giraffe Interchange Format". Hence the
pronunciation. Demonstration:
[http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7vg5p6c4u1r4ss8fo1_400.gi...](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7vg5p6c4u1r4ss8fo1_400.gif)

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aroch
Reminds me of this page: <http://www.olsenhome.com/gif/>

Which has, conservatively, been around forever

>I worked with the creator of GIF (Steve Wilhite) when I was still employed by
CompuServe. Steve always pronounced it "jiff" and would correct those who
pronounced it with a hard G. "Choosy developers choose GIF" (spinning off of a
historically popular peanut butter commercial).

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softbuilder
I'm pretty sure it's pronounced "ping" now since GIF is rolling slowly to the
dustbin. Of course I'm sure the creator of the PNG format would say it's
pronounced "pong". At least _that_ would make sense. The whole jiff joke was
never, ever funny.

The reason people use a hard G is because that's what makes sense given the
wording of the acronym. Unless I've been pronouncing "graphics" wrong this
whole time?

~~~
sillysaurus
_I'm pretty sure it's pronounced "ping" now since GIF is rolling slowly to the
dustbin._

PNG can't be used to make animations. GIF can. That alone is enough to ensure
GIF will be around for a long, long time.

~~~
IbJacked
It's not universally supported, but there _is_ an animated png format:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG>

~~~
tom9729
As noted in that Wikipedia page, there is also the MNG format
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-image_Network_Graphics>).
Unfortunately it's over 10 years old and there is still little browser
support.

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krapp
I don't care what the creator of the format says. I'm using the hard g.

~~~
jamespitts
I'll keep mispronouncing it too, but will stop needlessly arguing with the
silent-g zealots.

~~~
wging
There are no silent-g zealots. No one pronounces it 'if' :)

~~~
Millennium
Actually, I think I may have to start doing that now.

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300bps
I use GIF pronunciation to tell how long someone has been on the Internet and
precursors of the Internet. I got my first modem (300 baud Mitey Mo) in 1985
and I've seen this story come up at least 50 times since then.

If you've been on the Internet over 15 years then this will not be news to
you. The other thing I find interesting about the GIF format is how everyone
assumes it was designed for animation. I saw someone on reddit "knowingly"
tell another redditor "oh yeah there can be non animated GIFs they just
consist of a single frame of animation."

~~~
untog
I've been on the internet for nearly 20 and didn't know. How would I find out?
I wasn't aubscribed to alt.pronunciationpedantry

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bonjourmr
The 'G' sound in the word 'G-raphics' (GIF = Graphics Interchange Format)
makes more sense to carry over to the acronym. I think the boats
understandably sailed Mr.White!

~~~
300bps
What about JPEG then? Should that be pronounced JPHEG since it stands for
Joint Photographic Experts Group.

~~~
aptwebapps
That's how I'm rollin' from now on.

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kps
The creators of SCSI wanted it to be pronounced ‘sexy’ (SeCSI). Tough luck.

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mratzloff
Don't talk bad about GIF! GIF is a great format. Once upon a time I wrote a
GIF89a library that supported animation, etc. I found it straightforward to
parse and write, eminently extensible, with a clear and easy-to-read
specification.

No one has been able to get their act together and propose a successful PNG
animation format, but I'm disappointed that the "PNG in GIF" proposal never
took off. Size wouldn't be so bad since most images would share a global color
space, and browser makers could easily implement it.

ftp://ftp.simplesystems.org/pub/png-group/documents/history/png-in-gif-
proposal-20070413.txt

~~~
grapjas
What resources did you use to implement gif89a?

You already mentioned the specification (
<http://www.w3.org/Graphics/GIF/spec-gif89a.txt> ). Did you use anything else?

~~~
mratzloff
Animation is now considered a core feature of GIF, but it was implemented as
an extension by Netscape and surprisingly there is no official spec for it.

Extensibility is provided for in the specification, but the actual
implementation within each application extension is, of course, application-
specific.

The extensions I know about:

\- NETSCAPE (animation)

\- NETSCAPE (buffering)

\- ANIMEXTS (same as Netscape animation)

\- GIFCONnb (found this GIF Construction Set extension during testing but
didn't try to reverse engineer it)

The only one of consequence is the animation one.

The page I used at the time to describe the animation extension no longer
exists, but this page describes it and others:

<http://www.vurdalakov.net/misc/gif>

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MattGrommes
I personally don't care which pronunciation you use. As long you understand
it's 'gib', not 'jib' when you blow somebody into pieces.

/me ducks

~~~
adregan
Same problem as GIF.

Gib, short for giblet, the innards of a bird, can be (and is) pronounced both
ways — "j"iblet and "g"iblet. Where I'm from, it's always been "j"iblet, but I
wouldn't mind if someone pronounced it differently.

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kmm
GIF will be around until there is another animated image format with decent
support. APNG seems nice, but needs to be supported more. Personally, I like
GIF. It's simple and can be included everywhere with a simple img tag. It's
possible to animate with CSS, Javascript or video, but that's a lot more
hassle and cannot be done in a comment box.

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freshyill
Perhaps this will help: <http://howdoyoupronouncegif.com>

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adregan
If you want to be well liked, don't ever be the person who directly corrects
other's pronunciation of words.

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Scryptonite
I'd let a machine decide.

[http://translate.google.com/#en/en/GIF%20or%20JIF...%0Agif%2...](http://translate.google.com/#en/en/GIF%20or%20JIF...%0Agif%20or%20jif...%0AGif%20or%20Jif...%0A%0A%22.gif%22%20or%20%22.jif%22..).

Google's Text-to-Speech seems to pronounce it with a Soft G.

~~~
nirvanatikku
actually, the 'machine' is trained with a voice model. so, when you're saying
that you'll let a machine decide, in this particular case you're really
letting google decide (and expecting them to have baked in an appropriate
pronunciation of gif).

here's what we've got at nuance: GIF or JIF -> <http://bit.ly/1938drD>.

the google translate tts models are older than their android models
(particularly network tts), and it seem as though it still treats it similarly
-> <http://bit.ly/12tpCol>

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lazugod
It's pronounced "bikeshed".

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mcmSEA
"that's Frahn-ken-steen."

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joonix
And it's "Amerigo," according to Vespucci.

~~~
lotharbot
When he wrote in Latin, it was _"Americus Vespucius"_. Martin Waldseemüller
decided to name the continents after him on his 1507 map, using the feminized
Latin version: _"the Land of Americus, or America: since both Europa and Asia
got their names from women"_ (thus, America holds the name it was given.)
Amerigo was apparently never made aware that a continent had been named for
him.

See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerigo_Vespucci> ,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Waldseem%C3%BCller> , and
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_of_America#Etymology_and...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_of_America#Etymology_and_naming)

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D9u
I used to say "Ihm-grr" (imgur.com) instead of "Ihm-jer" so I guess I can
learn to say "Jiff."

~~~
rangibaby
It's not image-er? ;-(

~~~
D9u
Yes, your pronunciation is correct.

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armenarmen
I used to pronounce it incorrectly, but my friend who built the NSFW site
theworstdrug.com, which lets you click through the most popular GIFs on tumblr
(hint they are all porn) enlightened me

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nickhalfasleep
The only thing pronounced is how aged and antiquated the format is.

~~~
kibibu
There's something to say for ubiquity and convenience. People would rather
load a 50MB Animated GIF than watch a 10MB video of the same thing in higher
res.

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Luc
GIF, JPEG, PNG,... all these are not English words, so multiply possible
pronunciations by a hundred (every Dutch speaking person I know pronounces
them the Dutch way).

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nirvanatikku
'jif'? what!? <http://qkme.me/3uig7w>

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vytasgd
The dancing baby that started it all... I can't believe that was 17 years
ago...

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workbench
As if they chose that stupid derivative yahoo GIF to headline this.

