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To me, a gif (at its best) is effectively a quote from a video—a short sample of a film or TV show that can be embedded into an article as an example to be discussed, serving the same purpose that a blockquote serves.

Ideally, such things should—rather than being copied and cut into shape—be transcluded, effectively fancy links to an original that include time-slicing metadata. But making transclusion an easy or default behavior has been a losing battle for text since the web was created; I don't expect changing the medium being embedded will change how people think about things.

Ted Nelson would be so proud.

The atomicity of the internet - sealed documents at URLs - is really regrettable. A much more powerful design (although admittedly more complicated) would have been a "turtles all the way down", IPFS-style approach where any asset could be transcluded or linked into. But I don't think we'll ever see it.

Mediawiki (the thing behind Wikipedia) actually lets you transclude whole pages and it's also the way its templates work. It's pretty cool because you can also have options to not include certain info inside <noinclude> tags and some templates such as for episode lists even show less information when transcluding. Oh and you can also transclude specific sections IIRC.

By linked into, are you saying by URL? I notice that archive.is actually adds its own links to the side like a ruler. I think the status quo of linking only to headers is okay, but maybe you're envisioning something like linking to specific words in sentences. That would be great for quoting but the HTML would probably look/load horribly. Maybe there could be a system that let you link to offsets so it wouldn't need actual anchors in the source, but those could break with a simple addition of a word at the beginning. It's an interesting problem for sure.

> To me, a gif (at its best) is effectively a quote from a video...

This is a very nice definition. Thanks!

In that analogy, to me it comes across as a quote written in very large font, double-underlined, and surrounded by exclamation points.

Take, for example, the context behind "What is GIF May Never Die." I don't know the reference, but a Google search for "What is * May Never Die" says it's from Game of Thrones, and something to do with the Drowned Gods. But what does the video add to that quote? As far as I can tell, it doesn't. Or do I need to research further to understand the context for that specific scene?

(Transclusion would help here.)

For those who know the series, what does the video add to the quote "What is GIF May Never Die" to justify that use of space?

Or if that's not a good example, what's an example of using this technique at its best? Because the issue trackers I've seen which use GIFs this way come across as using a lot of inside-jokes that I don't understand, and saying little else.

Now you're getting onto a different issue, which is people using multiple megabyte+ gifs where a few lines of text would work just as well. It's the next step of the trend which sees most short text content posted these days baked into a background image.

Perhaps. Where's an example of this quoting done right?

And isn't my complaint the same issue that SquareWheel raised? ("it makes it incredibly difficult to focus on the text.")

Don't mistake the term "quote" here to refer only to quotations of speech; a gif can "quote" things that aren't dialogue. Body language; VFX; visual gags; animation styles. Add the sound back in—but keep the "short" and "looping" qualities†—and you can quote foley effects, "silly noise" gags, and acting tics.

In the same way that e.g. video games are at their best as an art-form when their interactivity is essential to their message, these visual quotations are at their best when they're "quoting" something that can't be reduced to static pictures and text.

I note that—where available—people seem to like using sub-second gif clips of old cartoon characters making very particular expressions, in place of emoji. These are quotations: quotations of body-language "acting" depicted in a TV show. We don't think of them that way because we're not "quoting" with rigour for the purpose of critical analysis, but it's still what's going on.

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† I don't know what to call these... pseudo-gifs. The type of thing you find on Vine or Tumblr: webm videos restricted to a 5-second length, autoplayed and autolooped, but played silently until clicked on. This form is just as common now as the classical gif for sharing, though you don't tend to see these audio-gifs embedded in articles.

I don't think I mistook you. The Popular Mechanics piece gives an example of quoting body language from Audrey Hepburn in the 1953 movie 'Roman Holiday'.

I don't know how I'm supposed to interpret that loop, or how it fits into any context. I can think of multiple interpretations, and have no way to figure out which one is meant, or if that mixture of interpretations is the point.

It's "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" for me, but without even the search ability that the text phrase has to figure out how it's used in context.

Do you have an example of how quoting is used in a good way?

> "quotations of body-language "acting" depicted in a TV show"

Similar problems exist in TV shows when actors require the watcher to know the allusion (or "quote") in order to understand what's going on. I remember as a kid watching the old Loonie Tunes and recognizing there was a gag, but not understanding it. My mom would explain that it depending on knowing that they were referencing some piece of 1950s American pop culture.

When done well, the quotes fit in smoothly. You don't need to know it's from an external source, though knowing that it does provides extra depth and texture. For example, see "References to 70-80’s movies in Stranger Things" at https://vimeo.com/175929311 .

But in mixed media of text and video, it's very hard to make a smooth transition. That's why I wrote that the clips seem to stand out in large font, exclamation points, etc., as a "look at me!" attention grabber giving the quote far more attention as a quote than as a supplement to the conversation.

That's more a problem with Twitterfied absurd message length restrictions. Rather than 200 bytes of text, you get 200 kb of pixel data. Progress!

The video in this instance adds very little. You get to the see the motion of the actor saying the words 'what is dead may never die', but a static image of the scene with the text written on would have been just as effective in this instance.

Unless it's a commentary on how often animated GIFs are pointless and bloated items which could be equally served by using static captioned images. In which case, it's hit the nail on the head perfectly.

What's the point of including a clip from the original video to share the words when there's no audio and the words are subtitled on? At that point, you may as well just post a still image with subtitles (which is just as interesting, but less distracting and doesn't use anywhere near as much data).

> Even small subs which used to be the place to go for deeper discussion have largely devolved into image boards targeting the lowest common denominator.

There's some black humor here in how the actual imageboards (4chan, etc) are heavily pushing towards WebM for short animations.

Because it is likely that a poster on an imageboard made the video themsevles, rather than reposting in an environment that may only permit simple image links, it encourages them to save it as webm instead of distilling to a GIF (not easy to do properly, very bandwidth intensive on view), which allows the videos to be longer and higher quality while file size caps can be lowered.

Mobile users are also thankful for this trend.

> Even small subs which used to be the place to go for deeper discussion have largely devolved into image boards targeting the lowest common denominator.

I'm a bit late to this thread but honestly after many years online I've come to the conclusion that most people outside of HN don't want to come home after work to have deep discussions and would rather post and upvote "lowest common denominator" stuff.

I actually have the reverse reaction. I find the frustrating slow load-times of the modern internet intolerable, and enjoy how low-quality gifs start immediately, unlike cumbersome videos.

Fast load times are one of the things that keep bringing me back to hacker news.

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

http://m.imgur.com/Owxi9?r

And a GIF is worth a thousand * framerate * seconds words. How can anyone be surprised they're beating images?

If only I could view that "movie" with Chrome on Android.

I just watched it on Chrome for Android. Just had to tap to play

Firefox has a setting that prevents images from being animated (in about:config): image.animation_mode set to none

(The gifs are still loaded and present as static images. Video files pretending to be gifs are not dealt with.)

> Video files pretending to be gifs are not dealt with.

For that you need:

media.autoplay.enabled

You will have to pause/unpause youtube videos to get them to play.

Biggest issue is that I can't figure out how to play videos with ads on youtube since ads don't have a pause button. (I just play them in VLC instead.)

the practical reason for this happening is that you can put images basically everywhere (github PR comments, emails, etc.), but these facilities rarely support video. Video support on the net has until very recently been pretty awful too.

Now that the video tag can be reasonably expected to work, in a couple of years we might have the tools to just embed video when we want to.

Firefox has Gif Block: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gif-block/

I share that feeling. Just as the world seemed to be getting nicely settled with PNGs along comes Giphy with a mission to destroy the universe.

So even when the anim isn't either a tedious throwback to the worst excesses of geocities, or there just to distract and annoy it's garbage quality. Someone will post a video, in gif form, to help illustrate some post, and you can barely make out a thing as the dithering has sent the detail to oblivion. Just make an mp4.

Simply being able to stop a gif anim by hitting ESC was far too useful, so browsers don't do that any more, or sites are somehow blocking it.

I don't understand the appeal of gif anims at all.

There were some sites that would let you hit "play" before showing a gif, I think that's a better approach, as long as you can pause them after. That Atom example is really bad on the eyes. Of course I can always hit "ESC" to force all gifs on one page to stop, but that's just forcing that on the page. I like the option to pause and unpause gifs. I guess that's why gifs to video became a thing. Never knew about gif to video back to gif though.

Agree totally to this. Also I find that you have to really wait to know if the GIF animation has really ended or not or how long it is! That can irk me, specially since in the same time, you can click on a Youtube link and see the timeline and content in quality form, stop it without any suspense.

I keep animations off by default; it definitely makes the Web less distracting. On the other hand, I've seen many others browsing pages with plenty of GIFs and other distractions, often with no adblocker, and it just astounds me how they can even concentrate with all the other stuff trying to get their attention.

(This reminds me of the other discussion here about Chrome users accidentally activating the Back shortcut because the focus isn't on a text input. Perhaps they were too distracted by all the other cruft on the page, like animations, that they didn't notice more subtle things like the focus changing...)

I understand the troubles you're having with GIFs, however, I'd just like to say that none of the modern "image video" formats work on my Android, which is why I have to use a separate browser from Google Play Store to download the video and then use another separate player app to watch what usually amounts to a 5-second clip of something happening. In many cases, I'd prefer a GIF of the file.

I agree they're nauseating, but it's somewhat amusing to watch them become popular again.

The funniest part, IMO, is that the people who have "Watch this GIF of me entering code! OMG!" on their Github README are more or less the same crowd who were complaining how low brow and annoying GIFs were ~10-15 years ago.

This is exactly one of the reasons why I like reading HN so much, especially the comments. The lack of gif animations or emoji is really refreshing. Thank your for keeping it simple.

Are there any browser plugins that add video controls to gifs?..

If not, why isn't there a browser plugin that adds video controls to gifs?

My guess is that nobody wants to get their hands dirty working on what's probably very old code for a very old format.

That and maybe the fact that it's probably not very easy to travel back and forward in GIF's incrementally painted animation model described by Gankro in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12333329

Here's a bookmarklet that gives you video controls: http://slbkbs.org/jsgif/

It lets you play it backwards, frame by frame and change the speed.

I made a Chrome extension that opens a player on specifically selected gifs but not wholesale (would need too much memory)

https://github.com/0ui/gif-scrubber

Firefox has a built-in config key to disable animated images: image.animation_mode. And Chrome has a extension too.