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An Honor for the Creator of the GIF

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Re: An Honor for the Creator of the GIF

#43

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?

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.

WebP also supports animations, don't know how that compares to GIF though.

Re: An Honor for the Creator of the GIF

#45

I'd let a machine decide. http://translate.google.com/#en/en/GIF%20or%20JIF...%0Agif%2... . Google's Text-to-Speech seems to pronounce it with a Soft G.

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

Re: An Honor for the Creator of the GIF

#46
post #9

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 someo…

On old Macintosh systems, JPEG files would often be labeled "JFIF file"[1]. This created some confusion which I believe contributed to people adopting the hard G pronunciation.

Back during the dotcom boom, there was a joke: "We'll hire anyone who can spell GIF." At some point even the joke transitioned to a hard G sound. Some of us long ago decided to 'go with the flow'.

[1] This was due to a freeware program called JPEGView, which was often set up as the default viewer for .JPG files. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_File_Interchange_Format

Re: An Honor for the Creator of the GIF

#49
post #11

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?

>slowly to the dustbin Slowly is a bit of an understatement. The format has been in widespread use for a quarter century.

I'm an optimist? :)

Re: An Honor for the Creator of the GIF

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not universally supported, but there is an animated png format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG

Practically speaking, it is not supported enough to be any useful.
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