sysanon (nobody.delete@this.example.com) on September 27, 2013 4:33 pm wrote:
> Doug S (foo.delete@this.bar.bar) on September 26, 2013 6:21 pm wrote:
> > Mark Roulo (nothanks.delete@this.xxx.com) on September 26, 2013 3:06 pm wrote:
> > > The link you give works fine for me, too (on my iPad3).
> > >
> > > Try this:
> > >     http://extramustard.si.com/2013/09/25/30-gifs-of-this-baseball-seasons-biggest-bloopers/
> >
> >
> > Egad, that webmaster deserves to be shot! It isn't all that fast on my Q9400, and worse on my
> > iPhone 5. Not surprising when it is trying to animate 30 fairly high-res sequences that ought
> > to be MPEG2 or MPEG4, not GIF. I grabbed just ONE (the first one) and it was 4.5 MB in size!
> >
> > This is not something I care to ever see optimized on any platform, because we certainly
> > don't want to encourage it. I guess this is the 2013 equivalent of the Geocities page
> > with the animated backdrop of falling leaves and the 48 point flashing yellow text...
>
> Can you suggest a better alternative for displaying animation embedded
> in a web page across virtually all platforms and browsers?
>
> I'm not saying it's a good technology, I'm just saying it's the best technology.


What's wrong with h.264 animation? Seems to work pretty well for Youtube. If for no other reason than it would make for at least a 90% bandwidth savings!

The thing that really puts this over the top is showing 30 different animations on the same page. Why not do it as a slideshow so you have only one at a time? Or if you must display them all on one page, require a click in the image to start the animation since people who want to scan this quickly and look for interesting ones will only find some of them interesting.

The developer of this didn't have to load all those 4.5MB images over the internet, but instead over his local gigabit ethernet (or even off his local drive) When he did his final tests they were surely in cache for him, and his browser may have had all the intermediate images rendered from previous tests. I don't think he had any idea what he did there.