Choosy Moms Choose Portable Network Graphics

There's been an explosion of GIFs lately. There are times when the motion capabilities of a GIF are useful. But really, those are few and far between. Most ideas that don't require a video of any appreciable length can be depicted perfectly well in a static picture. The number of things that can be depicted well in a clip measured in seconds is small.

You see, you can depict motion in a still picture.  Take a look at this Cheetah chasing a gazelle:

"Cheetah chasing Thompsons gazelle crop" by Original uploader was Profberger at en.wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia; transferred to Commons by User:Richard001 using CommonsHelper.. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.

Wow, that looks fast.  See, we don't assume that the cheetah and the gazelle are standing still just because we can't see them moving.  It's actually pretty amazing how we can imply movement.  Take a look at Umberto Boccioni's Dynamism of a Soccer Player:

"WLA moma Umberto Boccioni Dynamism of a Soccer Player 1913" by Wikipedia Loves Art participant "shooting_brooklyn" - Uploaded from the Wikipedia Loves Art photo pool on Flickr. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

It's not even a picture of anything, except the movement.  My point is that we aren't living in Harry Potter's world where everyone expects every picture to move.

Sometimes movement can be useful.  There's that GIF of the ice-cream-sandwich machine which is fun to watch, and the occasional blooper or cat video. But now people are using GIFs to show moving clips of things that don't really require it. If I see a picture of a great white shark, I get it, I don't need to see it biting something to get the full effect that one gets from a picture of a shark with its huge, toothy, mouth open. But worse, now you see clips of people talking in movies even though GIFs don't have sound.

I'm not complaining about GIFs because they're new technology (for one thing, they aren't) but rather because they, like most technologies come with a price that needs to be weighed. In this case, it's the bandwidth needed to send the GIFs. Video is, after all, a series of pictures. And unlike other forms of video, GIFs don't have a way of conserving memory by reusing the data for parts of the image that don't change from frame to frame. So adding a moving GIF to your blog or web page is like adding dozens of similarly sized pictures. That's fine if you have a fast Internet connection, but if you're like many of us - particularly in rural areas - a page decked out in gratuitous moving GIFs take forever to load, with little payoff.

The sad part is that this problem is just repeating the same problems the web had always had: too many people treat web design as an attention-getting collage, with no consideration for the consequences, both technical and psychological. Moving GIF are just the latest incarnation of the blink tag, Java applets, frames, and Flash.