Hacker News Reader

History truly is a circle: We replaced animated GIFs with soundless AVC/HEVC/VP8 videos for storage efficiency, then we replaced still JPEGs with the superior HEVC/VP8 intra-frame compression formats (i.e. HEIF/WebP), only to replace that with JPEG-XL (hopefully soon) – which is apparently a good starting point for a simple animated graphics codec :)

View on HN

There's a lot of use cases, and the irregular development of the different technologies has lead to ebb and flow between different methods. But it's not going in a circle. If you track specific use cases, you'll see them moving a lot less.

The intended replacement for animated GIFs was MNG, but it never took off.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com