![]() And while the palette is variable and can be customized to best match the colors in the source image or animation frames, GIF color representation pales in comparison to the 16.8-million-color palette we’re accustomed to with more modern image formats such as JPEG. A GIF image is limited to a maximum of 256 colors, which was fine for a typical 8-bit monitor circa 1995, but laughable for a modern Apple Cinema display, for example. If you’re using a MacBook Air or iOS device, chances are that the animated ads you’re seeing are good ol’ GIFs (if not HTML 5).ĭespite its improbable success over time, the GIF format is showing its age. To attract attention and maximize their marketing messages, advertisers relied on animated GIFs-short slideshows would display the product, deliver the message, close with the oh-so-amazing price, and then loop over and over again.Īs time wore on, the GIF format yielded the advertising space to Flash, but there’s been a bit of a reversal in the past few years. At the dawn of digital advertising, ad blocks were quite tiny, reflecting the low-resolution displays of the time. Not surprisingly, animated GIFs played a key role in the commercialization of the Internet. From then on, the steady, reliable GIF has endured, due largely to its limited capacity for animation, despite competitors like the PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format. In the mid-1990s, support for the format by the Netscape browser let creators choose the number of times the animation would loop.Ī flood of animated GIFs thereby ensued-no respectable website was considered complete without at least one animated GIF, no matter how inane. Though it was never intended to serve as a platform for animations, a 1989 revision to the format (popularly known as GIF89a) allowed these frames to be displayed with time delays, permitting frame-by-frame animation. The format included two features that quickly earned it favor with programmers as well as the brand-new Web design community: image compression, which reduced the overall file size, and the capacity to hold more than one image (or frame) in a single file. But no matter how you say it, GIF technology allowed the online services company to deliver downloadable color images, a remarkable accomplishment for its time. Suffice it to say that about as many people seem to be proponents of the hard- G pronunciation as of the J. GIF-short for Graphics Interchange Format-was developed in 1987 by CompuServe, and a perpetual argument has raged about how to pronounce the one-syllable acronym, an argument I will not even attempt to negotiate.
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