(13/11/2010 06:46 PM)Mc Cabe Wrote:  Slightly contradicting but...sorry Assassinator

Sorry I came across too opinionated.

Don't worry about it, I can't say I'm any better a lot of the times, so yeah, don't take it to heart.

(13/11/2010 06:46 PM)Mc Cabe Wrote:  Great point there...

I'm interested to hear your thoughts on why GIF animations should be supported in future versions of browsers.

Well, to my knowledge, the only animated image formats (that are at least somewhat supported) are currently animated GIF and animated PNG.

Animated PNGs do give better quality (as PNGs are lossless), but according to the animated PNG page on EP, a lot of browsers don't support it yet (including IE and Chrome, which together makes up a large browser market share).  But that was some time ago, so things could possibly have changed.

Anyway, even if animated PNGs are much superior (it's not completely the case, since filesizes are also to likely be much larger, see what zinga said here), and animated GIFs are to become replaced as the main way of displaying animated images, browsers would still need to be backwards compatible.  The same reason why video playes still need to support old formats like XviD and MP3, even ancient stuff like MPEG1 and 2, even though newer formats like H.264 and AAC are much much superior in every single aspect.  Even more so, because you can convert all your MP3s to M4As (AAC), but you can't convert all the animated GIFs on the internet to animated PNGs.

I would be happy if lets say, every XviD+MP3 AVI got replaced by a higher quality and smaller H.264+Vorbis MP4/MKV, but you know, old standards tend to stick for a long long time.

(This post was last modified: 13/11/2010 07:29 PM by Assassinator.)