Some of us who self-identify as a Gurry do not participate in all “so-called” parts of the Gurry-lifestyle.

There are a bunch of GIF hacks out there (like getting truecolor images by loading in small sections of the image as tiles with 0 delay set between them) that are cool but don’t work in browsers and thus aren’t used.

“GIF celebrated a lexical milestone in 2012, gaining traction as a verb, not just a noun,” she said.

Today, GIFing is often used to make comical reaction shots featuring celebrities or sports figures.”

Uh, has anyone here ever heard someone use GIF as a verb? This is new to me.

Am I asking for advice?  I don’t know.  Am I howling at the moon?  Definitely.

Oh, who am I kidding but myself, it’s because of Nyan Cat.

Musically, seems to reference the timing beeps that allowed you to set your watch on the hour during BBC World Service radio broadcasts.

Also, thank you for not saying “The OED named gif the word of the year”. The OED is just one of the dictionaries produced by Oxford University Press. :-)

If you want to save size (and transmission time) with small images then one can use a “sprite sheet”/”sprite table”/”tile set” hack where a bunch of images are combined into one and then use something like CSS to pick out sub-images. For this large image PNG generally works best though JPG or animated GIF could be used. This particular BoingBoing page uses around 9 sprite tables, the largest being:

http://s.ytimg.com/yts/imgbin/www-refresh-vflMaphyY.png

I personally would like to see structured images become less of a hack that involves separate outside knowledge of where the sub-images are located – say a standard that lets one externally refer to “up” of “buttons.strim” and have that structured image know the size and location of the sub-images named “up” . Such a standard should be able to handle both sprite tables and animated-GIF like things. while allowing an animation to be externally manipulated – e.g. changing speed, stopping, playing backwards,isolating sub-animations, etc..

The APNG (animated PNG) standard works in firefox (see examples on that page) but it doesn’t seem to provide an interface for external control much less a simple usage as a sprite table, which is why I think a better standard is needed. Animated-GIFs can contain a lot of internal structure that allows small portions of a total mostly static image to be animated. This is much different than converting a total animation into a video file.

And technically speaking it is copyrighted.

“The Graphics Interchange Format(c) is the Copyright property of CompuServe Incorporated. GIF(sm) is a Service Mark property of CompuServe Incorporated.” (from the GIF89a Specification)

Where I see the big failure is on the PNG committee, who have never managed to make APNG or MNG anywhere near as common as GIF.  It should have been a plug-in replacement in browsers and authoring apps, but I’ve had the impression that both formats were over-engineered and difficult to integrate as a result.  Also, libpng could have been smarter about trying to encode files efficiently instead of falling back to full 24 bit colorspaces with alpha channels that gave PNG files a reputation for being huge.