The Animated GIF
yeah, last thing I ever want to see is a freaking animated gif
Apparently there are people who disable animated GIF images in their browser. Call me ignorant, but until today, I didn’t know that was something you’d want to do. I’m not sure how serious he was, but hearing the above today from somebody I well respect made me question my own use of the animated GIF.
I suppose it makes sense. Disabling GIF animations will allow you to browse without worrying about the chance of running into a website that makes repugnant use of a technology made popular during the dark ages of the web. Animated GIFs went out with star backgrounds, marquee and blink tags, MIDI background music, and Netscape 3.0. I guess if I have the chance to disable them, I will.
While I’m at it, I’ll disable Javascript because that can’t be used for anything but evil.
AJAX and DHTML have revitalized the use of Javascript, an annoying little language that’s used to open popups and scroll spam in your status bar. Disabling it these days means you’ll miss out on what some people are calling version 2 of the web. Apparently a bunch of people have learned to use it for more constructive purposes, such as empowering users to submit forms without reloading the page, and giving them back the intuitive drag-and-drop interaction they’ve become used to. (As well as making games that should have been done in Flash.)
Animations play an important role in interface design. They attract your attention. They give feedback to your actions. They let you know the system is busy. You can do this and avoid using Flash by using DHTML, but even DHTML is overkill for simple, inline, frame-by-frame animations.
It just so happens, there’s a great technology to do just that, which has been around since 1989: the animated GIF.
I’m using an animated GIF in Vantage. I’m not ashamed of this. I’m just a little irked to find out that people will be disabling what should ultimately be useful to them; not to mention they’ll be making my application seem partially broken. I use a single 16×16, black and white animated GIF to indicate the application is busy performing a task. It happens to look like an animation many people are familiar with: the Mac spinner. I find what I’m doing tasteful and even slightly clever.
Maybe I don’t get it. And I’m probably overreacting. There must not be many people that block animated GIFs if I wasn’t familiar with the act, right? Still, I can’t think of a time in recent history when I came across a distastefully used animated GIF that wasn’t an ad I could simply ad-block. I mean, this isn’t distasteful, is it?
October 15th, 2005 at 4:22 pm
Ads tend to originate in the same places, animated GIFs are abused all over the place.
“On the whole” — whatever that means — I totally agree with you.
October 16th, 2005 at 12:25 am
So, before AjaxWar, I remember seeing ajax-y sites that had a div that popped up saying “processing” or “contacting server” OR non ajax-y sites that displayed animated gifs while certaint processing was happening on the server site but the image wouldn’t be replace until the page refreshed.
Did I invent the practice of using small, square, rotating, animated gifs to indicate activity status in a simple manner without leaving the page on ajax applications?
November 24th, 2005 at 2:46 am
Nothing’s wrong with animated gifs!
I for one welcome our new spinning “@” symbol overlords.
December 10th, 2005 at 9:06 pm
I agree with Adam. Fellas, I hate to break it to you, but to graphics geeks like me GIFS are still a quicker (and easier-to-produce) alternative to full scale QT movies, RealPlayer, and all of those other things that require a lot more money, time, and server space.
Second, there is still a market out there. Not everybody can write in four or five code languages (explaining what MEL, C++, ASCII, or anything like that to my mother is like trying to teach a chimp Flaubert) so people like me continue on with medieval methods for the technologically retarded. When files become more compressible you may see otherwise, but until then, the GIF lives.
February 27th, 2006 at 11:09 pm
I’ve disabled animated pix mainly because the tendency of people in forums to have brash and “busy” signature pix really annoys me. When I go to a forum page, I don’t want to feel as if I’m in a 1970’s disco!
October 22nd, 2006 at 8:55 pm
http://hometown.aol.com/dtc131/OLDTNewsletter.htm
Scroll all the way to the bottom so you can experience the full rigors of the page.