general

Years ago I used to write letters to the newspapers criticizing their art coverage and critics; they were certainly as mean as anything Paddy Johnson's commenters have thrown my way lately. (A few were published!) The difference between my salvos and those of the Johnson posse was the context: I was complaining about actual gatekeepers with the power to decide what hundreds of thousands of people read and saw. Questioning the legitimacy of their opinions had the potential to change the dialogue.

What is at stake in telling a blogger not to link to another blogger? I suppose it's flattering that people think I need to be sidelined through non-linkage but this seems like a vestige of the print era.

Surely a better solution to the problem of a voice you don't like is to offer an alternative. The power differential between yourself and "a net guy with too much cred" is nowhere near as great as it was twenty years ago between a reader and a journalist. If you (or your commenters of choice) have something to say, readers will be drawn in those directions (via the buzz cloud!).

I am an "indie." I don't work for an institution, and have mostly ducked mainstream writing gigs the past 10 years. Since I have no gatekeeper position, it's just petty to opine whether my ideas are better or worse now than they were. If you don't like what I write, don't read it, but trying to convince other bloggers not to link to me is just being stinky for no reason.

I appreciate the frequent linkage from Paddy's blog but lately it's coming with a price. Her comments are blossoming into hatefests where any n00bie with a chip is allowed, even encouraged to vent loud and long on my shortcomings. I think of the scene in Time Bandits where Robin Hood redistributes trinkets and goblets to the poor, accompanied by a hard punch in the face from one of the Merrie Men.

I will continue to link to Paddy, and assure her that if I had commenters I would ban or castigate the first one that attacked her as a person.

One of Paddy Johnson's commenters found what he believes is a major factual inaccuracy in my post about Google's Martha Graham animation--so major that he spammed her blog with comments loudly and repeatedly claiming that I was guilty of "intellectual dishonesty." (Somewhat like makers of signs on American highways telling you that a tourist attraction is coming up--keep reading folks, the truth is just four comments ahead... three comments...)

The gist of his argument is that, (i) with no prior knowledge of CSS or JavaScript, he "fully understands" how to create CSS animations "after less than five minutes' reading" (although he never tested this knowledge by making or posting an animation) and that therefore (ii) I've created a false binary between easy to make GIFs and hard to make CSS animations. It's great that authoring tools for non-GIF animations are starting to appear, but would they enable you to create the "Martha Graham dance"? Many have suggested otherwise. As one commenter noted on AFC, "Google likes to show off what their programmers can do with simple code." Another opined that "GIFs are files that are definitely easier to understand and handle than Google's scripting." A computer science-educated artist who I emailed before putting up my Martha Graham post described Google's animation as "a brittle coupling of assets and dependent on the state of the HTML document embedding it" and therefore a probable "preservation nightmare" (as compared to GIFs). Much had been written on the wider Internet about How Google Did It. All of which is to suggest that "anyone" couldn't have done it.

Some late-breaking comments on the GIF thread from hell. If you can't attack an argument you must demolish the credibility of the person making it, so suffice it to say I am now little more than a smoldering pile of ash. I did help one reader refine his views, though, going from "Who knows why Google chose HTML5?" (for its Martha Graham animation) to speculating that it was because mobile browsers lack adequate GIF support. This same commenter goes on to bluster that

Tying Google's tech choices re: their doodles to policies against GIFs on their other sites (like Blogger) is naive (and, frankly, stupid). Facebook, Twitter (& whomever else) block animated GIFs for 1 reason (which you already mentioned): they don't want to be Myspace.

Paddy Johnson agrees :( and suggests that

what's happening to GIFs seems a little like the Polaroid problem to me. People still make the film, but it's impossible to find. Not being able to shoot Polaroid doesn't mean that artists will stop being creative, but it does mean they may have to switch mediums if it's no longer practical. That will be more painful to some artists than others.

To which I replied:

If we don't know why Google blocks GIFs in one arm of its company and pushes other animation methods in another (and we don't), why is it automatically naive to consider connections between the two? More is at stake here than the type of "film" we use; it is completely fair to consider an across-the-board GIF phase-out in the larger context of the Web becoming a more controlled and controllable place (see my comment to Duncan below). "They don't want to be MySpace" is also pure speculation.

Duncan Alexander, in another late-breaking (and excellent) comment, said that "it's apples and oranges to compare GIFs to code hacks," to which I replied

It's not an apples and oranges debate though, or people wouldn't be yelling so much. Google doesn't mean to replace GIFs with another filetype people can share and take apart and play with. On its flagship search page it is clearly presenting its vision of a "one way web" crafted by its owners where the terms of your interaction are "click here" and "save your results." To consider the political dimension isn't conspiracy theory or empty railing against the man, it's a question of what kind of internet (and therefore, life) we want to have.

In an era when Facebook=Web this has mostly been decided for us and bemoaning the fate of the GIF does have a hopeful, 2004 ring to it. Consider these arguments back-dated.

Another day, another rancorous discussion of animated GIFs. This topic brings out the worst in people, possibly because livelihoods are threatened. If everyone can do web design, who needs to hire designers? The cross-posted comment below is out of context but responds to several topics on the thread. The first refers to AFC intern Will Brand's leading questions about "GIF partisanship":

Paddy, Will designed the web page for you that has links to many of my (and others') writings on the subject of "why artists use GIFs": http://www.artfagcity.com/gif/links.php
He knows my answers to his questions, he is being needlessly confrontational here.

As I said in one of the posts linked to on that page: "Have said before that I'm not married to the animated GIF for 'artistic expression' on the web. If at some point only of 40% of browsers, mobile devices, etc read them then it will be time to use something else."

Michael Manning is correct that we use GIFs because they're still the best for what they do--quick easily loaded animations that read on the most browsers. He's also right that the big companies are phasing them out without offering a better alternative. Some of us like the "GIF aesthetic" of reduced frame rates, compression, etc, but that's mainly a stylistic choice.

In light of "cinemagraphs" Reddit has a discussion on "successors to the animated GIF": http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/i23fk/why_there_is_no_successor_of_animated_gif_format/ (hat tip Andrej)

That thread reiterates some of what has been said here but doesn't mention CSS.

I wish in these shouting matches we could agree on some basic post-GIF nomenclature. I originally referred to Google's Martha Graham animation as "html5 or canvas." Will called it "CSS sprites and JavaScript to animate them"; then Tim Whidden went back to calling it HTML5. According to Wikipedia "A common misconception is that HTML5 can provide animation within web pages, which is untrue. Either JavaScript or CSS3 is necessary for animating HTML elements. Animation is also possible using JavaScript and HTML."

I assume that Google's animation was a combination of CSS and JavaScript--that isn't automatically HTML5. Either way, our current GIF alternative seems to boil down to, as Michael Manning says about Tumult Hype, a "bad and less capable version of Flash."

Adding: the "canvas" element is a tag that can be added to HTML5 pages. It's not for animation per se. The main advantage of canvas seems to be interactivity--you can draw in it. In any case it's not in wide use and isn't really being proffered as a GIF substitute--please correct me if I'm wrong about this.