Or if everyone just gives up the ghost of GIF and let it die … it is a highly inefficient format and the only reason we stick with it is that it is so universally ingrained in everything.

GIF is the digital equivalent of a fax machine … many business offices still have a fax machine in their system and there is always someone out there who still uses a fax to transmit a paper message from one person to another for some ‘official reason’. I know some people who treat faxed documents as some sort of holy relic that deserves reverence or respect just because it is a ‘fax’ - it can’t be altered, it can’t be forged, it is something we’ve done for years. It’s a holdover from a bygone era and there are still people who won’t let go of it … GIF is treated the same way. Every piece of software can accommodate GIF just because they always did. Everyone knows it is a dinosaur that is not very good for anything but we use it just because we all can.

I’m still learning about new codecs and video containers and how they all work … I thought WEBM was a good option but now realize that it may be a more proprietary container that is aligned with Google while MP4 is a similar file container that is more universal and more open standard to a whole industry internationally rather than to just one company.

It’s going to be a bit of a slog for a while until someone figures it out … but to me, it just feels like the early emerging internet from the 2000s when people were trying to figure stuff out. It’s exciting and liberating because it makes me wonder where everything is going to go from this moment on.