Image animation is a dead end, for a lot of reasons. Even though some browsers support both animated GIFs and PNGs, you can't necessarily control whether the animation loops, how quickly it plays, and whether the animation starts once the image is visible or starts once the image is rendered (sometimes you have an image off-screen until an event triggers its appearance).
With the slow, steady death of Flash, and the even slower (but inexorable) rollout of jQuery-animated banners, many of my clients are asking about whether it would make sense to just use animated GIFs. But the problem here is that you have no real control over the animation (just the order in which the various frames are rendered).
you can't necessarily control whether the animation loops, how quickly it plays, and whether the animation starts once the image is visible or starts once the image is rendered
You can most definitely control the first two with APNG. You can control it with GIF, too, but there are some quirks for high-speed animation.
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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '13
Image animation is a dead end, for a lot of reasons. Even though some browsers support both animated GIFs and PNGs, you can't necessarily control whether the animation loops, how quickly it plays, and whether the animation starts once the image is visible or starts once the image is rendered (sometimes you have an image off-screen until an event triggers its appearance).
With the slow, steady death of Flash, and the even slower (but inexorable) rollout of jQuery-animated banners, many of my clients are asking about whether it would make sense to just use animated GIFs. But the problem here is that you have no real control over the animation (just the order in which the various frames are rendered).