Stephen Wilhite, creator of the GIF, has died | Hacker News Reader

Stephen Wilhite, creator of the GIF, has died

theverge.com

81 pointscoloneltcb12 comments

In honor of stephen wilhite, though I am an ardent proponent of pronouncing gif with a hard g sound, I'll pronounce it as "jif" for the rest of the week.

Choosy developers choose gif!

Stephen's obituary from the article is available here: https://www.megiefuneralhome.com/obituaries/?obId=24311617

A credit from there, not mentioned in the article, is that at one time he was chief architect of America Online (AOL).

If you want to see the most crass but hilarious thread, here is the reddit thread about this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/tlcm6r/stephen_...

It's got some pretty good g/j jokes in there.

Looks like he lived a full life.

Not to be too crass, but... is it pronounced "Stefen" or "Steven"?

RIP. Was there ever a widely adopted alternative to GIF in the browser for animated pictures (like PNG is to JPEG)? Or is using video formats in place of GIF made a replacement irrelevant?

WebP images support animation, and they're fully supported in Chromium and Firefox[0], but Safari support seems flaky[1]

[0]: https://caniuse.com/webp [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68522707/animated-webp-f...

Animated Portable Network Graphics (APNG) has broad browser and tooling support. (Which surprised me. I knew of the format but didn’t know that it has become viable…)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG

The latter. Looping video is the replacement.

This. I think Imgur has been using "gifv" which is just WebM. Imageboards that used to accept GIF only now also accepts WebM.

Telegram's "GIF"s are actually H.264 MP4s without an audio track.

And I think Lottie or SVG may be a viable replacement to SWF movies. Sadly there is no software working with these formats that is as user-friendly as old-school Flash.

MJPG aka motion jpeg is just a stream of static jpeg images IIRC. You see it a lot from cheap IP cameras and browsers don't have any trouble rendering it as an animated image.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com