Hacker News Reader

Comment by dguo | Hacker News Reader

Author here. That is good criticism! Thanks for bringing it up. I didn't consider other factors like ease of sharing.

They are definitely tradeoffs. At least for my personal website, the size disadvantage of GIFs still outweighs them, in my opinion. I think bandwidth usage and battery drainage are also worth thinking about on behalf of the user.

View on HN

I disagree, the phone/laptop manufacturer will get blamed for bad battery drainage, not the app/website/media.

For bandwidth, I'm going to blame my ISP, Chrome, firefox, etc.

For the media (gif versus movie), I'm going to blame the website.

As a website operator, I feel a personal responsibility to consider how my choices affect those things, even if my users might incorrectly blame others instead of me.

Thank for you reply. And of course, you have a good point. If what is important to you is saving space and bandwidth, then serving videos is probably the best solution.

The irony is a modern gif filetype would be even better. Something that retained the advantages of gifs, but allowed for better compression.

We don't even need a new file type, we just need browsers to let us use video files like MP4 et al in IMG tags and give us gif-like behavior (muted, autostart, and loop).

I mean, I know everybody is really pumped about webGL and shadow DOMs and webcomponents and webASM, but I feel like the basic "html as document language" could use some loving to solve this.

This whole mess reminds me of SVG. I get that there are fantastic reasons why SVG has JavaScript and its own DOM and can pull in external resources, but sometimes we don't want a whole new framework for new forms of content, we just want an IMG.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com