Your thoughts on animated gifs [closed]

Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.

Closed 11 years ago.

开发者_JAVA百科 Improve this question

i'm about to choose between using an animated gif, flash or html5/js for a short animation to display a sequence of different images.

what are your thoughts on animated gifs? Are they dead? Should I use HTML5?

THanks for some interesting thoughts. :)

---

I'd say an important factor is the size of images you want to cycle. For very small images, perhaps sub-100px, an animated GIF might be ok. For anything larger, such as portfolio or item images, they're pretty much unacceptable. It's not so much about semantics or SEO, but rather image quality; GIFs simply don't look good for complex (e.g. photographic) images.

HTML5 doesn't come in to the equation, the markup will be almost identical between (X)HTML4 and HTML5. The javascript is the key part in cycling images, and there are a whole bunch that do all sorts of fancy things, depending on your needs. One of the most well-known jQuery plugins is the cycle plugin. It's very easy to implement.

To return to the idea of semantics and SEO, a GIF embedded in a page doesn't look like many images, so search engines won't know it, meaning any one performing an image search pertaining to what you're trying to display won't find your images. If you use a JS cycle approach, all of your images will be embedded separately in to the markup, and search engines will pickup on this. It does allow users to download the individual images, whereas with a GIF it would require either deconstruction in a GIF editor or a screenshot, but this will either be an advantage or hindrance, which you can consider accordingly.

To summarise: you almost certainly want to cycle to images with javascript.

---

I would definitely not use flash for something so simple, especially when it makes that part of your website inaccessible to devices such as the iPhone, iPad, etc. HTML5 is nice, but no browser supports 100% of it, and some of the mobile browsers are very lacking in support. A gif would probably be the easiest hassle free way of doing this.

---

Animated gifs are not good or bad. They are a tool that is widely supported. If they fix your problem you should not hesitate to use them.

---

Animated gifs would work everywhere.

Flash would be extremely heavyweight and creates a dependency to a flash.

HTML5 is nice, but is not supported by everyone yet.

---

Depends how complex it is... if it's only a short series of images simply use JavaScript without HTML5. You'd only have to write a few lines of code to produce the effect.

---

Animated gifs aren't dead. In fact, they're probably more popular now than they have ever been because of so many animated gif memes. That being said, animated gifs can be useful, but consider the advantages of a more dynamic format, that animated gifs can't recreate:

• Transitions between images
• Can be generated dynamically
• File size might be lower

If you don't need those features, or anything else that Javascript provides, then use an animated gif.

---

As previous answers mention, if an animated GIF is all you need, then go for it.

Flash would be a slight case of overbombing.

If you want something slightly more flexible, you can still use js without bringing HTML5 into the mix, of course. By making a simple jQuery slideshow out of it, you could buy yourself transition effects and an easy way to replace images. But again, if you don't need that, or that is overkill, then go with the GIF.