Side note: autoplaying html5 would be a massive annoyance, because html5 video can have audio.
This could be browser configurable. "Allow videos with audio to autoplay". Won't be worse than the flash ads with audio I run across regulary which autoplay audio.
No, youtube or vine don't cut it, I want to be able to give people a link to a raw file that they will automatically know to be small and silent.
Flash keeps on working. Well mostly, as well as it ever has worked.
Even better are pages that see that I have FF and just assume they can feed me video, not allowing me to fall back to Flash if I have bothered to go to about:config and disable all relevant HTML5 settings.
Gif is easily copy-pastable, both by content and raw file URL. Thus help its viral spreading
...other than software vendors and patents :/
And those with bandwidth caps are doubly grateful for that. Once for not being opted into wasting bandwidth, and again for the smaller file size if they choose to use it.
People don't really want GIFs; what people want are filesize-limited, auto-playing-but-only-while-visible, auto-looping, and silent-by-default videos. Let's call these "animated images."
The problem is thus: you're designing a piece of forum software, and you're considering whether to allow people to embed various elements in their posts.
There's problems with allowing people to embed arbitrary videos: they can steal bandwidth, slow the browser to a crawl, make sudden noises, play to completion while the tab is in the background, etc.
But if you allow people to embed static images, then there's no additional consideration required in allowing them to embed animated images. Wherever a static image works, an animated one works.
Right now, there are two ways to allow people to embed animated images: either you allow .gif as an image upload format, and then display it without processing--or you allow videos, but do quite a bit of server-side processing (of the kind Vine and Facebook do) to make the result into an animated image.
If there was an adapter format -- some simple file format that:
1. referred to a video by URL (maybe it could be an HTML5 document whose root is a <video> element?), which would then be embedded in place of the metafile;
2. whose media type fell under the image/* hierarchy;
3. and for which the browser would automatically enforce "animated image" semantics,
then that format would be a perfect replacement for GIFs.
I don't buy the argument about stealing bandwidth. A 50MB GIF is just as much of a bandwidth leech as a 50MB MP4.
For example; Github README files, we can insert a GIF of a screencast, but obviously we can't run our own JS, CSS, or embed video. There is where GIFs are the only option, unless of course you want to redirect to an external site, but for small repos it's overkill.
The other issue, is saving and sharing. How many people have a folder full of GIFs? Has anyone tried saving a GIF from the polymer element? As you can imagine, it saves a frame, which makes it useless. Sure, you can add a button to Download a compiled version or the original, but why should we add custom controls when everyone knows Right Click Save As?
For me, cross platform compatibility without requiring an extra file (HTML to actually play) per GIF if more important than filesize and bandwidth. Bandwidth is obviously costly, but maybe the issue is knowing when to create a GIF and when to create a video instead, why is the issue with the playback why not emphasise on the creation size?
For example loading a 3mb gif would be something like 330+ frame elements that are being looped.
But I like the idea though :)
@kogir
This thread demonstrates a small HN bug: I think the title is being encoded to HTML entities two times.
I really like the pingpong effect, the speed and the music sync seems more gimmicky.
