141–150 of 242 posts
Currently there are lots of forums and other similar software that allow embedding of images (including gifs) but don't allow embedding videos.
Making small gifs is an art: Dithering, color quantization, sub frames that don't move, etc. However I must agree that for most content shared online, video is more efficient.
Perhaps we could create an RFC for GIF21? The mistake people make in trying to replace GIF is doing too much, turning it into a wholesale replacement. Take GIF89, add intra-frame compression, lossy mode for frames, and expanded colors. If you stuffed the new format frames end the end with index numbers old clients could play the sequence at a much lower framerate without too much of a hit to file size. But you accept…
So instead of using good solutions that are already out there, we should just polish a turd instead?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm glad someone else thinks like this, the other devs on my team get so caught up on the little things in the application we are building and all this little crap the user won't care about if it doesn't work as they expect. I end up being the only person saying "If I was the user, I'd expect this. And if I was doing this, I expect this behavior". Instead, they act as if the user has a PhD in cs, and instead, the use…
While I agree with this pro-user sentiment, you best believe I will be there in 5 years to complain about all the unbelievable choices made by software developers for the sake of pleasing the lowest common denominator users who just gets used to whatever UI they learned first and now all future programmers are forced to copy that UI, no matter how bad it is for future generations to come.
Browsers and platform defaults could go a long way to improve video UX but they don't. Not having to open my network tab to save video would be a place to start. Being able to right-click to copy/paste them would be another.
These aren't "lowest common denominator" things. They're everyone things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strongly rebuts the case of the article if truly the cause.
In case of twitter, there's an important difference in uploading video vs gif. Although a gif is converted to video, it will autoplay and loop without any user control available, just as it was a gif (sadly, you can't download/drag as a gif). If you upload as a video, if will behave like regular video
One important thing that was not mentioned in the article: gifs automatically play and are not easily stopped. Videos have more knobs on the client side to tweak whether it plays or not. If I use a gif, I know with great certainty that unless all images on the client are blocked they are going to see my animated content. There are tons of extensions and browser features out there that attempt to stop that feature fro…
1. Users have bandwidth limits. (And videos are big.) 2. Users hate constant motion on the page. (And videos have constant motion.) 3. So users stop videos from playing automatically. 4. Publishers want the video to play, so they stop using a proper video format, and use the GIF format, which produces even bigger files, and prevents users from stopping the motion. Something’s horribly broken here. I really want brows…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> One final note: according to Wilhite, GIF is pronounced with a soft “G,” like “jif.” That would be correct if GIF stood for "Gerbil Interchange Format" rather than "Graphics Interchange Format".
I've never understood that argument; why would an acronym need to preserve the exact sounds of the letters in the original words? I don't think it's very uncommon for them not to. "UNICEF" is not pronounced "yoo-ni-chef", "POTUS" is not pronounced "po-thuss", "OSHA" is not pronounced "oss-huh", etc.