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I'm quite sad the the animated PNG format never caught on. Not only does it have a technical edge over GIF (full alpha channel transparency, more color channels, etc.) but it also tends to have better compression/smaller file sizes. I think that if Google had implemented support for it in Chrome it likely would have caught on.

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I agree. It would be nice to see a format like Sublime Text's pseudo animated GIFs [0] take off. It's not perfect because it requires JS + PNG + JSON and currently the python build scripts only work well on linux. If other tools started providing export functionality to this format then it could get more interesting. Historically, iterating on these ideas on the client has been a good way to get standards implemented in browsers.

[0] http://www.sublimetext.com/~jps/animated_gifs_the_hard_way.h...

That's a very interesting approach, the packing in particular is much better than the usual transparency hack used for GIF animation compression. Using overlayed divs for faux-blitting where canvas is unavailable is also cool, though perhaps somewhat fragile.

In my experience apng is usually only neclectible smaller than gif a and a way bigger if not in the indexed colours mode.

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