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GIF's don't support alpha transparency, making them the opposite of practical for an effect like this.

At least GIFs work more or less the same on all browsers. This is an excellent example of how not to do it.

Imagine the support call: "Click on the blinking dot" : "I don't see any blinking dot" : "It blinks for me, do you use a webkit browser?" : "A what?"

CSS beats graphics because it can be changed programatically. Browser supporting, _all_ the parameters can be changed to suit the rest of the UI. If the designer writes their CSS in browser like I do, it's instantaneous and immensely powerful.

With images, it's, well, you know, slower.

Well you could script it to change the rate of pulsing in JS I guess... Still don't think this is very exciting anyways. Why the png and not pure a pure css icon for instance (although that's not very interesting to me either)?