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Please Stop Making Terrible GIFs (thereallo.dev)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

I’ve honestly given up on support of new formats.

Here we are, 2026, and brand new software like Lemmy:

  • Doesn’t support AVIF

  • Doesn’t support JXL

  • Doesn’t support WebP

  • Won’t upload short, small videos either.

Meanwhile:

  • Many clients won’t play animated WebP

  • Most clients won’t play APNG

  • Many won’t load AVIF

  • Basically only Apple/Safari will load JXL

  • VP8/VP9/AV1 support in video isn’t universal

What am I supposed to do?

I used to send support requests over this, but I’ve given up. We are going to be stuck with SDR JPEGs and blocky GIFs forever, especially since media format literacy seems to be globally.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    What am I supposed to do?

    You decide what to target, and work with what you have. That's how it's always been with web technology.

    If you need to support the barest minimal possible clients then you might not even have HTML5. Otherwise, if you have HTML5 you can use the source tag to provide clients with a choice of formats/encodings and they can pick the one they support. If the clients can't even mange that, well, things on the internet have always been broken anyway.

    And somebody's gotta start somewhere, WebP was shoved down everyones' throats and now it's supported very broadly, as AVIF pick up users software devs will take notice and start supporting it.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    Will they, though?

    I cite Lemmy again. This is supposed to be a newer, better version of Reddit, basically, but I can't even upload a WebP to my instance... when are they supposed to adopt AVIF?

    If I try to host externally, which is more of a pain, very few image hosts will take an AVIF. Not a single one I found except catbox will take a JXL.

    Where's the pressure? Who's making these files and trying to use them? Even my phone converts uploaded JXL and HEIF files to SDR JPEGs upon upload, since it rightfully assumes nothing will work with them.

    I hate to sound so cynical, but I had your mindset a while back. And outside Apple, precisely nothing has changed. Its gotten more dramatic, if anything, since HDR support is now basically DOA too.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago*

    Where’s the pressure? Who’s making these files and trying to use them?

    The standards bodies and the companies that pay their bills. That's Netflix, Google, et al. All have a vested interest in good multimedia support in browsers. It's why browsers have shockingly good support actually, most of the problems are downstream on clients and implementations that don't know or care to enable these newer formats.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago*

    Maybe I overestimated how widespread support for alternatives is. The problem seems to be to be that while most apps will support an alternative, no single format is supported everywhere (xkcd). According to another comment US messaging apps don't support any alternatives, which is enough to keep GIF alive on its own.

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