The Digital Materiality of GIFs
digitalmateriality.com
The Digital Materiality of GIFs
1–10 of 31 posts
Re: The Digital Materiality of GIFs
#2>57 requests, 28,189.09 KB
I don't believe any new animated gifs should be made, except for animations such as pixel art. They are inferior in every way to html video. The success of webm on sites like 4chan are evidence that gifs offer no advantage in terms of portability, ease of sharing, or features.
Re: The Digital Materiality of GIFs
#3>57 requests, 28,189.09 KB I don't believe any new animated gifs should be made, except for animations such as pixel art. They are inferior in every way to html video. The success of webm on sites like 4chan are evidence that gifs offer no advantage in terms of portability, ease of sharing, or features.
Except videos carry along with them the presumption of audio content.
Re: The Digital Materiality of GIFs
#4Over 60 MB of GIFs on that page according to DevTools. The Fight Club GIF alone is 9 MB.
It's a terribly inefficient format, but I think a lack of free and open video formats (and editing software) is partly to blame for its meteoric rise.
Also: video is harder to share and is typically recompressed on every upload, reducing quality.
Re: The Digital Materiality of GIFs
#5>57 requests, 28,189.09 KB I don't believe any new animated gifs should be made, except for animations such as pixel art. They are inferior in every way to html video. The success of webm on sites like 4chan are evidence that gifs offer no advantage in terms of portability, ease of sharing, or features.
Hehh heh: Did you only read the stats on loading the page :)
Seriously, the whole entire point of the page is that, yes, GIF is technologically inferior and therefore wanted by no one, and therefore, allows incredible freedom of expression!
That's information we can use to make better startups!
Instead of trying to own everything and start from scratch with the most efficient artifacts like file formats, try to leverage from "inferior" techniques in order to allow the user-generated content to flourish!!!! I'm glad someone posted this!
Re: The Digital Materiality of GIFs
#6>57 requests, 28,189.09 KB I don't believe any new animated gifs should be made, except for animations such as pixel art. They are inferior in every way to html video. The success of webm on sites like 4chan are evidence that gifs offer no advantage in terms of portability, ease of sharing, or features.
Hehh heh: Did you only read the stats on loading the page :) Seriously, the whole entire point of the page is that, yes, GIF is technologically inferior and therefore wanted by no one, and therefore, allows incredible freedom of expression! That's information we can use to make better startups! Instead of trying to own everything and start from scratch with the most efficient artifacts like file formats, try to lever…
GIF is technologically inferior and therefore wanted by no one, and therefore, allows incredible freedom of expression
I suppose I'm being quite negative, but I don't see the logic in that statement. In what way does it allow more freedom? The biggest advantage I think gif has at the moment is familiarity.
Re: The Digital Materiality of GIFs
#7>GIFS are a dumb, limited file format,
and in the end this is why they are
important:
>They do not belong to anyone.
This may be true now, but for the majority of its lifetime GIF did not belong to everyone, due to Unisys's patent on LZW.
Re: The Digital Materiality of GIFs
#8Over 60 MB of GIFs on that page according to DevTools. The Fight Club GIF alone is 9 MB. It's a terribly inefficient format, but I think a lack of free and open video formats (and editing software) is partly to blame for its meteoric rise. Also: video is harder to share and is typically recompressed on every upload, reducing quality.
GIFs are so stupidly easy to use and distribute that I sometimes can’t wrap my head around how convenient the format is.
A while ago, I tried to be a good nerd and convert some GIFs to HTML5 video, and I crashed and burned pretty hard: https://ndarville.com/asides/webvideo/.
I gained a new appreciation of GIFs that day.
That said, it would be great if we got a compromise where browsers can load only the first frame of the GIF and play the reminder on click or touch to save all the loading and data—on both sides, really.
Re: The Digital Materiality of GIFs
#9>57 requests, 28,189.09 KB I don't believe any new animated gifs should be made, except for animations such as pixel art. They are inferior in every way to html video. The success of webm on sites like 4chan are evidence that gifs offer no advantage in terms of portability, ease of sharing, or features.
Except videos carry along with them the presumption of audio content.
By whom? If you look at typical "image" hosters, you can't really tell outside of loading times if it is showing you a gif or a video. Are there browsers that do "clever" things with videos because they think there is audio?
Re: The Digital Materiality of GIFs
#10>57 requests, 28,189.09 KB I don't believe any new animated gifs should be made, except for animations such as pixel art. They are inferior in every way to html video. The success of webm on sites like 4chan are evidence that gifs offer no advantage in terms of portability, ease of sharing, or features.
Except videos carry along with them the presumption of audio content.
Also, no auto-play (or at least, no inline display) on iOS.