static gif images
Does anyone know why some static images are stored as a .gif file? That always confuses me as I thougth gif is for animation.
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Could be a still from a moving file. 0 -
GIF can be animated or static. GIF images are good for line drawings - cartoons, the GB logo up top, etc. and are limited to 256 colors. Of those 256, only 214 can be displayed the exact same on *any* computer capable of displaying color - the other 40 odd colors are different in Windows, old Macs, new Macs, and various unix and unix like operating systems.
PNG (portable network graphics) images can be good replacements for GIFs, since the GIF compression algorythm had some patent issues until very recently. Also PNG allows different colors to be set as translucent or transparent, GIF allows only one color to be transparent only.
If you want photos, you'll want JPEG (joing photo experts group) format for the web (jpg or jpeg extension). There are better formats for taking and storign photos in (like tiff) but they are not compressed, which makes 'em suck for the web. JPEG is lossy compression, but until you *really* compress it there isn't much noticable loss on a computer monitor.
And thats the comp-sci lesson for today.0 -
ahh, but it takes a real dinosaur for an explanation!
before .png (portable network graphics), before .jpg (joint professional graphics), .gif (graphics interchange format) was the preferred format for downloading pictures. as in, downloading pictures because at that time there was no such thing as web pages. it was the only improvement over .bmp (bitmap) specifically designed for graphics compression. others could be used but were originally designed for other appications, .tif for example was used for faxes but sometimes used for pictures instead.
as you know, nowadays you can make a little movie out of .gif slides; but this comes after .jpg is well established, so I haven't a clue why they didn't do that with .jpg instead.0
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