08.16.07Firefox 3 - A Farewell to animated gifs |
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The Firefox team is showing great dedication in its quest to fix the little things broken on the web.
Animated GIFs are something of an eyesore. Not to mention so very 1998. That’s why it’s refreshing to learn that the next Mozilla Firefox — version 3 is due to arrive in late September or early October — will include support for two new animation techniques that will encourage a shift away from animated GIFs and challenge the use of Flash for smaller user interface elements (where it’s unnecessary in the first place). These are experimental methods using data formats not yet widely supported. But they are an improvement over the status quo, and they point the way toward a future more reliant on forward-thinking web standards.
One is APNG, the animated portable network graphics format. It provides an animated extension to PNG image files, which have been around for a while. The format is intended as a replacement for the crusty old animated GIF. The effect is the same, except APNG animations look better than animated GIFs because they support partial transparency — where you’d see jagged edges on a GIF, you’ll see a smooth edge on an APNG.
Check out the demo at Mozilla Labs. As Justin Dolske notes in his post, you’ll need to be viewing the demo with a beta of Firefox 3 to see the animated PNGs in action. If you’re running Firefox 2.x, you’ll see a static PNG. The format degrades nicely and is backwards-compatible with the PNG parsers in modern browsers. Dolske also demonstrates the APNG editing tool he constructed. The little animation-builder will be available as an extension in Firefox 3. Learn more about APNGs on the Mozilla Wiki.
The other bit of animation mojo being built into the browser is support for the element. It’s an add-on to regular HTML that lets you draw and animate simple vector graphics. The element was originally developed by Apple for use in Webkit and Safari. It’s now part of the What Working Group’s set of proposed rich content standards for the HTML5 specification.
There isn’t a great deal of support for these data formats in the browser ecosystem right now, so it’s great to see Mozilla getting behind them. Not only are they simple solutions to nagging problems, but they are open-source and easy to implement with free tools.
When they are adopted in Firefox 3, and if the WhatWG wins support for HTML5 (which is currently under consideration at the W3C, the closest thing the web has to a governing body for standards), then APNG and will likely become as ubiquitous as Flash.
Oh yes, and that probably would also require Microsoft to adopt them as well. But, as I said, if Mozilla and the W3C take the lead, Redmond would feel the pressure to follow or be left behind.
Source: blog.wired.com
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