An Honor for the Creator of the GIF | Hacker News Reader

An Honor for the Creator of the GIF

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56 pointsfjordan52 comments

As everyone knows, GIF stands for "Giraffe Interchange Format". Hence the pronunciation. Demonstration: http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7vg5p6c4u1r4ss8fo1_400.gi...

Reminds me of this page: http://www.olsenhome.com/gif/

Which has, conservatively, been around forever

>I worked with the creator of GIF (Steve Wilhite) when I was still employed by CompuServe. Steve always pronounced it "jiff" and would correct those who pronounced it with a hard G. "Choosy developers choose GIF" (spinning off of a historically popular peanut butter commercial).

I'm pretty sure it's pronounced "ping" now since GIF is rolling slowly to the dustbin. Of course I'm sure the creator of the PNG format would say it's pronounced "pong". At least that would make sense. The whole jiff joke was never, ever funny.

The reason people use a hard G is because that's what makes sense given the wording of the acronym. Unless I've been pronouncing "graphics" wrong this whole time?

giraffics.

>slowly to the dustbin

Slowly is a bit of an understatement. The format has been in widespread use for a quarter century.

I'm an optimist? :)

I'm pretty sure it's pronounced "ping" now since GIF is rolling slowly to the dustbin.

PNG can't be used to make animations. GIF can. That alone is enough to ensure GIF will be around for a long, long time.

It's not universally supported, but there is an animated png format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG

As noted in that Wikipedia page, there is also the MNG format (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-image_Network_Graphics). Unfortunately it's over 10 years old and there is still little browser support.

Practically speaking, it is not supported enough to be any useful.

I'm still hoping for the rise of <video> tag based "gifs". Better compression, sound as an option. Vine provides a decent attempt at this.

Lack of sound may, in some circles, be considered a feature.

Yes, yes, very true.

WebP also supports animations, don't know how that compares to GIF though.

I don't care what the creator of the format says. I'm using the hard g.

I'll keep mispronouncing it too, but will stop needlessly arguing with the silent-g zealots.

There are no silent-g zealots. No one pronounces it 'if' :)

GIF creator: "You may claim, I'm a dreamer..."

Actually, I think I may have to start doing that now.

It's not mispronunciation. The author and the internet are merely misinformed.

I use GIF pronunciation to tell how long someone has been on the Internet and precursors of the Internet. I got my first modem (300 baud Mitey Mo) in 1985 and I've seen this story come up at least 50 times since then.

If you've been on the Internet over 15 years then this will not be news to you. The other thing I find interesting about the GIF format is how everyone assumes it was designed for animation. I saw someone on reddit "knowingly" tell another redditor "oh yeah there can be non animated GIFs they just consist of a single frame of animation."

I've been on the internet for nearly 20 and didn't know. How would I find out? I wasn't aubscribed to alt.pronunciationpedantry

On old Macintosh systems, JPEG files would often be labeled "JFIF file"[1]. This created some confusion which I believe contributed to people adopting the hard G pronunciation.

Back during the dotcom boom, there was a joke: "We'll hire anyone who can spell GIF." At some point even the joke transitioned to a hard G sound. Some of us long ago decided to 'go with the flow'.

[1] This was due to a freeware program called JPEGView, which was often set up as the default viewer for .JPG files. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_File_Interchange_Format

The 'G' sound in the word 'G-raphics' (GIF = Graphics Interchange Format) makes more sense to carry over to the acronym. I think the boats understandably sailed Mr.White!

What about JPEG then? Should that be pronounced JPHEG since it stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group.

That's how I'm rollin' from now on.

It is pronounced 'Wilhite' not 'White'.

The creators of SCSI wanted it to be pronounced ‘sexy’ (SeCSI). Tough luck.

Don't talk bad about GIF! GIF is a great format. Once upon a time I wrote a GIF89a library that supported animation, etc. I found it straightforward to parse and write, eminently extensible, with a clear and easy-to-read specification.

No one has been able to get their act together and propose a successful PNG animation format, but I'm disappointed that the "PNG in GIF" proposal never took off. Size wouldn't be so bad since most images would share a global color space, and browser makers could easily implement it.

ftp://ftp.simplesystems.org/pub/png-group/documents/history/png-in-gif-proposal-20070413.txt

What resources did you use to implement gif89a?

You already mentioned the specification ( http://www.w3.org/Graphics/GIF/spec-gif89a.txt ). Did you use anything else?

Animation is now considered a core feature of GIF, but it was implemented as an extension by Netscape and surprisingly there is no official spec for it.

Extensibility is provided for in the specification, but the actual implementation within each application extension is, of course, application-specific.

The extensions I know about:

- NETSCAPE (animation)

- NETSCAPE (buffering)

- ANIMEXTS (same as Netscape animation)

- GIFCONnb (found this GIF Construction Set extension during testing but didn't try to reverse engineer it)

The only one of consequence is the animation one.

The page I used at the time to describe the animation extension no longer exists, but this page describes it and others:

http://www.vurdalakov.net/misc/gif

I personally don't care which pronunciation you use. As long you understand it's 'gib', not 'jib' when you blow somebody into pieces.

/me ducks

Same problem as GIF.

Gib, short for giblet, the innards of a bird, can be (and is) pronounced both ways — "j"iblet and "g"iblet. Where I'm from, it's always been "j"iblet, but I wouldn't mind if someone pronounced it differently.

GIF will be around until there is another animated image format with decent support. APNG seems nice, but needs to be supported more. Personally, I like GIF. It's simple and can be included everywhere with a simple img tag. It's possible to animate with CSS, Javascript or video, but that's a lot more hassle and cannot be done in a comment box.

Perhaps this will help: http://howdoyoupronouncegif.com

If you want to be well liked, don't ever be the person who directly corrects other's pronunciation of words.

I'd let a machine decide.

http://translate.google.com/#en/en/GIF%20or%20JIF...%0Agif%2....

Google's Text-to-Speech seems to pronounce it with a Soft G.

actually, the 'machine' is trained with a voice model. so, when you're saying that you'll let a machine decide, in this particular case you're really letting google decide (and expecting them to have baked in an appropriate pronunciation of gif).

here's what we've got at nuance: GIF or JIF -> http://bit.ly/1938drD.

the google translate tts models are older than their android models (particularly network tts), and it seem as though it still treats it similarly -> http://bit.ly/12tpCol

It's pronounced "bikeshed".

"that's Frahn-ken-steen."

And it's "Amerigo," according to Vespucci.

When he wrote in Latin, it was "Americus Vespucius". Martin Waldseemüller decided to name the continents after him on his 1507 map, using the feminized Latin version: "the Land of Americus, or America: since both Europa and Asia got their names from women" (thus, America holds the name it was given.) Amerigo was apparently never made aware that a continent had been named for him.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerigo_Vespucci , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Waldseem%C3%BCller , and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_of_America#Etymology_and...

I used to say "Ihm-grr" (imgur.com) instead of "Ihm-jer" so I guess I can learn to say "Jiff."

It's not image-er? ;-(

Yes, your pronunciation is correct.

I used to pronounce it incorrectly, but my friend who built the NSFW site theworstdrug.com, which lets you click through the most popular GIFs on tumblr (hint they are all porn) enlightened me

The only thing pronounced is how aged and antiquated the format is.

There's something to say for ubiquity and convenience. People would rather load a 50MB Animated GIF than watch a 10MB video of the same thing in higher res.

GIF, JPEG, PNG,... all these are not English words, so multiply possible pronunciations by a hundred (every Dutch speaking person I know pronounces them the Dutch way).

'jif'? what!? http://qkme.me/3uig7w

The dancing baby that started it all... I can't believe that was 17 years ago...

As if they chose that stupid derivative yahoo GIF to headline this.

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