In my post about GIFs, I pointed out that the creators of the GIF file format explicitly said that it wasn’t meant to be a great format for animations, but since it was widely available in people’s browsers, and no-one actually read that spec, it ended up being used for animations all over the place anyway, and now it’s all the format is known for. By opening a technological window, and allowing some limited animations to be stored in .gif files, they closed a door (new file formats with more advanced compression are constantly pushed back on because people are used to GIFs.)

Unrelatedly, here are two keywords that exist in JavaScript: const and let. let creates a variable that can have a new value assigned to it later, while const creates a variable that will always have the same value attached to it. const is the typical way that people declare variables in modern JavaScript; thanks largely to linting rules and style guides like the Airbnb JavaScript style guide, which for whatever reason was very popular back in the day, a generation of programmers learned that changing the values of variables was to be avoided, and obviously const is the way to do that, right?

The animated GIF is a new kind of ideogram that computers have added to our lives. (An ideogram is a visual symbol that indicates an idea without corresponding to any specific spoken sounds.) You can convey a vibrant feeling in a brief moment of video, as long as the feeling is along the lines of: Leonardo DiCaprio raising a wine glass. Donald Glover carrying pizzas reaching a room filled with flames. A white guy blinking in idle consternation.

So why is the GIF under attack? Everywhere, platforms and hosting services are trying to replace it with other file formats. “GIFs” on Twitter are MP4 videos, set to be soundless and looping. Imgur introduced the concept of “GifVs,” which are mp4 or WebM videos that are displayed like GIFs, way back in 2014. The framework I’m using to create this blog, Astro, will automatically turn GIFs into WebP files when I deploy the site to production. One of the ground zeroes for the animated GIF phenomenon, Tumblr, has been experimenting with videos-as-GIFs for years, writing extensive, carefully-worded posts to try to introduce the concept without angering their userbase.

And make no mistake - users hate new file formats, like WebP. Statistically, you probably hate .webp files already. Here’s what a brief Google search has to say about them:

So why does this format exist? Why do any file formats exist? Why do I care? Let’s consider the practicalities.