An Honor for the Creator of the GIF • Hacker News Board

Re: An Honor for the Creator of the GIF

#51

Post by grapjas » Wed, May 22, 2013, 8:14 AM UTC

mratzloff wrote: post #31

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 ba…

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?

Re: An Honor for the Creator of the GIF

#52

Post by workbench » Wed, May 22, 2013, 9:08 AM UTC

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

Re: An Honor for the Creator of the GIF

#53

Post by mratzloff » Wed, May 22, 2013, 3:54 PM UTC

grapjas wrote: post #51

mratzloff wrote: post #31

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 ba…

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?

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