Stephen E. Wilhite has died
megiefuneralhome.com
megiefuneralhome.com
I didn’t make the cut and I thought he was a bit of a jerk during the interview. Turns out I was the jerk and Steve was actually being really kind to a kid who wasn’t even close to being ready for that level.
Anyway, what I can say is that Steve was a lot more than GIF. In fact, back then, no one really thought too much about it, but they thought a lot about Steve.
George Jones, another CompuServe alum, penned this a few years back. I think it’s a nice summary. https://web.archive.org/web/20220129204133/http://curious.ga...
TAR files from 1970s? ROFF from the 1960s is still used to create and maintain Unix man pages for all flavors of Unix. MIDI from 1983 is older than GIF....
CSV dates from 1972?
GIF89a has been exactly the same since 1989.
Plaintext obviously is the only exception, and I'd already emphasized that in my tweet.
Also GIF89a supported embedded text to be drawn, which is not implemented in any modern decoder I am aware of. Web browsers certainly don't support it. So GIF89a is not technically still in use - we're using a more recent, less standardized flavor.
If I recall, there are other things like this related to modern GIF versus old GIF89a gifs - I ran into a lot of this working on hiding information in GIF file encoding choices (not in the images or file, but simply in choices made by the encoder). Then I scanned zillions of online GIFs to see if someone else had done this, and kept finding weird edge cases in GIF89a.
I think there are also many currently used GIF extension blocks that are in use that were not in the GIF89a spec. I'll see if I can find a list and dates they appeared (remember, GIF89a allowed anyone to add extensions to the format, and many companies did). MIDI is one type of extension block that was once embedded in GIFs by some vendors. PCM audio is another block that appears in some GIFs (so would these not count as GIF format being modified later?)
So even GIF89a is not exactly the same :)
MIDI, v1.0, still works and reads just fine. And it's still widely used (likely the most common flavor of MIDI in use).
Current readers read ancient CVS files just fine, so there are modern behaviors, but the original file format is still also in use.
The tar format in use was made a POSIX standard in 1988, older than GIF89a. The extended formats do not have .tar extensions.
TROFF seems to use the exact same file format it did in 1973: https://troff.org/history.html. The extensions you mention are making it have different output formats, ore making a new version to process the same file format but with code under different legal provenance.
But the examples you gave ("an older format still works today") weren't my point. My point was that GIF89a didn't get any updates to its spec since 1989, yet it remained extremely popular as it is. That's different than a format getting occasional updates to its spec and that stays backwards compatible. If that were the case, even BMP/ICO would predate GIF.
ROFF and TAR are the same. No group owns some standard for them. And akaik ROFF is still the 1970s format.
Uh, there is RFC 4180? https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4180
From Wikipedia:
"The CSV file format is not fully standardized. Separating fields with commas is the foundation, but commas in the data or embedded line breaks have to be handled specially. Some implementations disallow such content while others surround the field with quotation marks, which yet again creates the need for escaping if quotation marks are present in the data.
The term "CSV" also denotes several closely-related delimiter-separated formats that use other field delimiters such as semicolons.[2] These include tab-separated values and space-separated values. A delimiter guaranteed not to be part of the data greatly simplifies parsing."
From the Library of Congress database on formats: A CSV file is "A simple de facto format, for which no single, official specification exists."
Just because one guy calls his flavor a standard does not make it a widespread standard, any more than one company adding MIDI to GIFs makes that the newest, universal standard.
I get that you must really, really want GIF89a to be the end all of unchanged golden formats. But the lengths you go to to ignore all this other stuff, without putting in equivalent effort to understand them, is not making the case. Simple spend a minute on Google before posting stuff that is simply untrue. It's easy to find all this stuff.
Since you don't seem to care to read about each format, and understand the nuances and that this question is not the black and white case you want, I'm done providing evidence or cases. Good luck.
Also the diff/patch format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff) is almost as old as GIF, but Wikipedia says unified diff support was added in 1990-1991.
PNG could arguably be seen as GIF 2.0, since it addressed the major shortcomings of the format. But since PNG had no animation capability, it could never fully replace GIF which held on for that one niche use.
Every word (except gin) that starts with G, then a vowel, then an F, is pronounced with a hard G. For example: Gaffe. Gift. Guff. Guffaw.
Most one-syllable words that start with G have a hard G (not an exhaustive list): Gab. Gad. Gag. Gal. Gam. Gap. Gas. Gay. Get. Gig. Gill. Gimp. Gird. Girl. Git! Give. Go. Goal. Gob. God. Gone. Gore. Got. Guide. Guild. Guilt. Gull. Gulp. Gum. Gun. Gust. Gut. Guy.
The word "gift" is the closest word to GIF, and it has a hard G. To pronounce GIF, just say "gift" without the "t".
You don't call the Spanish exchange student "Gee-Suss", you call him "Hey-soos", because it's a name.
Names for things get lives of their own.
Similarly, I don't think it merits looking at similar words for the "proper" pronounciation. If anything, it makes sense to look at expanded acronym (Graphics Interchange Format) which still points at the hard G (unless it's Jraphics Interchange Format :)). But hearing it from whoever coined the term is definitely similarly applicable.
Still, I would reiterate, names for things that get wide adoption get their own lives, and we'd face an uphill battle to stop people from using them how they want. As long as we can understand each other, we are golden. And when we can't, it's not that hard to get back on the same page.
This. I first learned what the acronym came from and assumed the G was a hard G from Graphics. I just assume anyone who pronounces it with a hard G learned it on their own.
Well, I guess you can say it how you want, but it still seems disrespectful to insist that majority rules over the inventor's wishes.
If you get a majority of people to say "zzleeper" is actually pronounced "crap bag", then majority rule wins, right, and you must acknowledge people when they call out "crap bag"?
I just don't really see how majority rule should follow. I'm also curious to what extent we allow this to function. Is it just limited to names?
Gin is all I need to be convinced honestly, and where I come from that's a more frequently used, relevant word than everything else you listed.
Anyway: this debate risks being inappropriate in this occasion.
“GIF” is like a brand. It’s a spec; a proper noun. As such, it has a clearly intended pronunciation that was unambiguously provided by the creator. That guy is dead now, so he may not notice, but try honoring his intentions for a day.
Everyone who gets dogmatic about “I don’t care what the spec is like” just comes off seeming to me like old Englishmen who quite clearly intentionally mispronounce non-English words (except French, which they relish…).
It used to be that the only folks I knew who pronounced this out of spec were my parents and grandparents (because the didn’t know better and were computer illiterate). Now, somehow, we have rafts of people who have adopted the posture of my parents in the 90s with pride.
I imagine that the next 24 hours will see a lot of these sorts of discussions…
It was “choosy developers choose gif”
these arguments are really bad, there is no real rule to follow, especially for an acronym. Anyways...
this gent was a gem, a real gentle giant and genius.... these debates are like germs and generate generic retorts, lets be more genuine.... I hope you are getting the gist of this comment.
That’s not how it works. That’s like trying to convince someone who names his son “Richard” how the last letters are supposed to be pronounced. There’s no amount of debate you could have that actually makes any progress one way or another.
There has been a huge debate about the real pronunciation of GIF over the years and many users have continued to offer their own arguments.
But in 2013, Steve settled the debate once and for all during his acceptance speech of his lifetime achievement Webby Award, revealing that GIF is pronounced with a soft “g”.
“It’s pronounced JIF, not GIF,” the beloved creator revealed to the crowd.That's hilarious. The bulk of the debate happened after he weighed in.
Giraffix Interchange Format.
Rumor has it that the SCSI folks intended it to be pronounced SEXY.
No F in gin. Giraffe, no hard G. Closest word doesn't work for many reasons. It's an endless debate.
Thank you for this Stephen!
...it wasn't until hours later when I was bored and idly reading everything that I saw that I earlier misread the title and learned the CompuServ/GIF connection in the HN comments.
As the U in scuba is for underwater, yet scuba rhymes with tuna instead of tundra.
I think it's bad taste to start speculating if someone dies from COVID whether they were part of some kind of ideological group that put themselves more at risk, he's actually part of a group that is just inherently more at risk.