Concept Versus Format — it’s Time to Redefine What “GIF” Means.
Here’s the thing about GIFs. They’re great. Little animations that let us embed little, short videos pretty much anywhere we want — Tumblr blogs, Buzzfeed lists, tweets and Medium posts one and the same.
Here’s the thing about GIFs. They’re terrible. They only let you use 256 colours and their file sizes are huge, causing massive bandwidth bills and endless delays when downloading over mobile connections.
Both of those statements are true, but the first one is talking about what GIFs do, while the second talks about how they work. So, I’d like to make a proposal: let’s make “GIF” an anachronism. Just like the save button that’s an image of a floppy disk, everyone will know what one does, but the representation will have no relationship to how it actually works today.
So, what is a GIF? It stands for Graphics Interchange Format. Apparently, you should be pronouncing it “JIF”. If we’re being pedantic you should actually be pronouncing it “animated JIF”, as a standard GIF doesn’t even have animation. It was created back in the mists of time (1987) before we were even using RealPlayer, let alone before we were streaming films on Netflix. Compression takes processing power, and back in the 80's we didn’t have a lot of it, so GIFs aren’t highly compressed. These days we have h264 and WebM video formats that allow us to compress full colour video to far smaller file sizes, and hardware decoder chips that make light work of turning those files into frames of video on your phone. But the GIF is frozen in time — it can’t take advantage of any of this.
Do you care about any of those things? Of course not. And nor should you. You just want to see some “deal with it” sunglasses slide over Hillary Clinton’s face as fast as you possibly can. So here’s my new definition: GIF, pronounced “GIF” (hey, we solved the pronunciation debate!) is a looping, audio-less video. Implementation be damned.
So we just replace all our GIFs with videos, right? Existing solutions like gfycat and Imgur’s gifv are already doing that, but there’s a problem.
Why that doesn’t work
The fact that the GIF is nearing middle age affords it one benefit — the way it behaves in a web browser was defined a long, long time ago. It’s in an <img> tag, it auto-plays, in the page, exactly where you put it. If we changed that now all hell would break loose.
The young upstart alternative, the <video> tag, was not so lucky. When they released the iPhone, Apple were concerned about bandwidth, battery usage and unwanted audio, so they limited the <video> tag — you have to tap it to activate it, and when you do, it occupies the whole screen. It made sense. On paper. In reality, people rejected those restrictions and continued to use GIFs, which resulted in even more bandwidth and battery usage than if Apple had just left videos to work normally. And so it has been for the last seven years.
So here’s my pitch to Apple: instead of making the <video> tag tap to play, make it tap to unmute. Limit the amount of data downloaded for each file if you wish. Add an attribute to control it if you must. It still handles the issue of unwanted audio, but it’ll let us replace the outdated GIF format.
Footnote: idealism, the enemy of pragmatism.
There are plenty of purists out there that don’t want all this animated nonsense in their browser. That’s fair. But it’s too late — we’re already in a world where this stuff exists, and arguing the fact just means we spend more time with today’s inefficient solution. How about Apple adds an option in the Safari settings menu?
