The GIFs (graphics interchange format, or format for exchanging graphics) are the soul of the internet. Let him throw the first stone who never spent a few good hours, which could be used for full productivity, seeing GIFs of kittens on the great world wide web. Everyone loves GIFs, undeniable. Or rather, almost all: programmers and developers have serious problems with the format.
Why? Simple: it is heavy, has a very bad quality and compromises the performance of any browser or application that displays it. Now, some developers around the world have a plan to kill the format and replace it with a better way to view animated content on the internet: videos.
Who explained it was the software engineer and CTO of Cloudinary (image hosting company), Colin Bendell, in an article in Planet Performance. He is one of the main names of a group of programmers that proposes a new way of showing animations inline on websites or blog articles.
The entire explanation is contained in Bendell's text, but basically the idea is to file the GIFs and, instead, create an img src = .mp4 code that will allow videos to be displayed on the pages in the same ways that we see famous animated images. that is, without controls, without sound, with automatic reproduction and in loop. As the videos are much smaller than a GIF (approximately 14x) and can be decoded 7x faster, this would provide a significant reduction in data and greater speed in the loading of the pages.
The developer Jer Noble, which works in the audio and video area of ​​the development of WebKit (Safari graphics engine), at Apple, implemented the code in the Safari Technology Preview and the differences were frightening. While Bendell's article weighed 46MB running on Google Chrome, on Ma's beta browser this number dropped to a mere 2MB. Impressive, right?
The best thing is that the inclusion of the technology in Apple's test browser indicates that it will be the first to offer the functionality to all users, there is still no specific date for its arrival, but it is hoped that it will be soon. In any case, it is important that all browser creators adopt the feature as soon as possible so that web designers and online content creators can take advantage of it (after all, it would be counterproductive to apply the code only to a tiny percentage of the audience).
Programmers who read us, your turn: what do you think of the novelty? Leave your impressions below!
via Daring Fireball
