> We've got webm and so on
The spiritual successor to animated GIFs — by that I mean nonlossy pixel-perfect animations — would be APNG, which is supported by virtually all current modern browsers: https://caniuse.com/apng
The spiritual successor to animated GIFs — by that I mean nonlossy pixel-perfect animations — would be APNG, which is supported by virtually all current modern browsers: https://caniuse.com/apng
That sounds way less awesome, when you consider it only had 256 colors, so allmost all content did indeed loose a lot, by converting to gif.
And this is actually the first time I have heard of apng and interesting that it is even now widely avaiable. But I do not really see a broad use case, compared to webm.
Because file size matters usually much more, than pixel perfect animation.
I wanted to convert a short screencast to a gif, result: hundreds of megabyte big monster, with crappy quality.
The same with webm: 2 MB and good enough quality.
But my point was, that the main use case of gif, were short videos and animations, people shared. And for this, I am glad that webm seems now broadly avaiable for that role.
Sure, we agree on that.
Nonlossy can be used for pixel perfect animations, lossy formats cannot.
> Because file size matters usually much more, than pixel perfect animation.
It depends. For video, that is true. For user interface, any glitch is distracting. Using JPEG for user interface images like buttons is in most cases a bad idea. Each format is useful in different situations.
> I wanted to convert a short screencast to a gif, result: hundreds of megabyte big monster, with crappy quality.
You are right, that is not a use case for GIF or equivalent formats.
In some sense, JPEG is just a really weird programming language. So a JPEG file is just a really weird program that gets interpreted by a JPEG decoder. Most normal JPEG encoders try to find a short 'program' in the 'JPEG programming language' that gets interpreted by the decoder to recreate a particular image reasonably well.
But there's no reason you couldn't ask for a perfect reproduction.
As far as I know, JPEG decoders are lossless and deterministic.
I asked this question on https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71201691/does-jpeg-allow... to get something definite.
Of course, you point still stands that JPEG is not a good file format for storing UI elements. Even if in theory you could torture the JPEG standard enough to make this barely work.
It is not, but this was still the main use case of gif - sharing short video sequences. With crappy quality, but it played everywhere. Apng is not the successor to that. Webm is, or will be.
So there might be niche cases in UI or games, where apng might make sense, but in most cases, I doubt people would see a difference between apng and webm - but they will notice faster or shorter loading times.
Per-frame palettes allow you to hack this a bit if you don't mind a few fractions of a second draw time for a static image¹² or only parts of the frame need to update each time for an animation.
Edit: some examples... A good illustration of the technique can be seen in https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FullColour.gif and https://gif.ski/ is a practically pointless but brilliant tool for making high quality gif videos.
[1] or don't mind some dithering on the initial draw with the more colours added in subsequent “frames”.
[2] though for a static image, just use PNG
Another reason could be that Discord caches images on its servers to hide viewer's IP from the original server hosting the image. The caching involves compression that sometimes breaks the image.