GIF is extremely lossy for this use case since they can't do 24-bit color. In addition to being unnecessarily gigantic, animated GIFs also look terrible for just about anything that isn't pixel art. GIF itself is a lossless format, but when you use it for stuff like this the whole process is super lossy.
Perhaps GIF wasn't intended for this use case? Oh right, it wasn't. There are plenty of video formats that are. That doesn't make them "GIF replacement".
GIF has already been replaced by better formats. The one exception to this is short, looping videos, where GIF still enjoys enormous popularity.
So yeah, GIF wasn't intended for this use case. But that's the use case it has right now.
Go back 20 years, and "GIF" means a 256-color losslessly compressed image, occasionally animated. Today, "GIF" nearly always means a short looping video with horrible compression.
Practically speaking, today, "GIF replacement" means doing a better job for short, looping videos, because that's all GIF has left at this point.
As long as Chrome/Webkit doesn't support APNG, there's no ubiquitous format that directly replaces GIF.
>Today, "GIF" nearly always means a short looping video with horrible compression.
To me, GIF means an image format. The fact that many people misuse the terminology doesn't mean we should propagate it. Instead, people should be educated on the difference between lossy video formats and image formats that support animation, and which is preferable for various sorts of media. Articles like the OP only confuse the issue further. As someone who has authored animation-editing software (Animstack script for GIMP), it's a major pain in the ass to explain these misconceptions to users. The least we can do is to use correct terminology, and educate people at every opportunity.
> As long as Chrome/Webkit doesn't support APNG, there's no ubiquitous format that directly replaces GIF.
That's a fun trick, to quote one sentence and disagree with it in a way that is already covered by the following sentence stating there is an exception.
I only quoted the sentence I was replying to. To assume I didn't read the rest of your message is, frankly, insulting. The exception you were talking about ("short looping video with horrible compression") is precisely the thing that both GIF and APNG aren't supposed to do well.
Both GIF and APNG support:
- palettes
- transparency
- different delay per frame
- combine/replace disposal mode per frame
Generic video formats don't generally support these.
Whether GIF was intended for this usecase or not (it wasn't, the GIF spec specifically calls it out as a bad idea [0]), it's overwhelmingly what it's used for in practice. Therefore anything that can displace GIF in this space is a replacement.
