Your thoughts on animated gifs [closed]

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. :)

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.