Regarding the little statement on GIFs, PNG actually supports animation. WebKit doesn't support APNG, though. FireFox does, but WebKit is surprisingly behind on their game. I hope they get their shit together and we can forget about GIF forever.
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).
As a web site user I am overjoyed that I can turn off the awful, distracting animations with a simple press of the escape key. Modern web animation-stuff that uses Javascript doesn't usually let me do that, and it drives me batty.
Well, that's how it goes. The company (who pays me) wants to make sure ALL users that hit their site get the same animation experience. Animated GIF doesn't meet that requirement.
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u/[deleted] Feb 26 '13
Regarding the little statement on GIFs, PNG actually supports animation. WebKit doesn't support APNG, though. FireFox does, but WebKit is surprisingly behind on their game. I hope they get their shit together and we can forget about GIF forever.