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A number of the shortcomings of animated gifs have been pointed out
but I think that they are relatively creator/user friendly. To
create one of these objects you did not need to purchase expensive
software or require the user to download a plug-in (which are browser
specific). Animated gifs can be created using easily obtained
shareware. Typically an animation can be created that is about
20-30kb, though I have seen much larger. None have ever been as big
as a typical Shockwave animation which are often 1mb+. As a dial-up
user these are very important considerations.
They can be annoying. An image of a cyclist on Channel 4's website,
http://www.channel4.com/, was central to an extremely vociferous
debate on the newsgroup uk.media between the site's designer and
critics. People, many liking the image itself, found its presence on
a page meant to be read (about the Tour de France) extremely
distracting.
In one way you can think of animated gifs as a guerilla format. By
which I mean the seeming ancient and dated gif 89a format was
suddenly rediscovered to have new possibilities and enabled everybody
and her dog to deliver multimedia web pages without having to get
into cgi, java or other complexities. They have been over used but
they are interesting way of delivering animation.
The latest betas of Netscape and MSIE deal with them in a less system
intensive way than did Netscape 2.*.
Gary
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Gary P. Mitchell mailto:[log in to unmask]
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