User talk:Brooke Vibber/Wikipedia data size test

Regarding the animation and GIF's poor performance as a file format - would MNG files work better? The Mozilla crew have so far refused to (re-)implement support for those, but I imagine that Wikipedia is big and important enough these days for them to at least consider it if we approached them and asked them about it. Other projects like Opera and Safari would likely follow suit, I imagine. (Of course, that'd leave IE as the problem child.) -- Schneelocke 07:59, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Firefox 3 supports a slightly different format, PNGA... go figure. :)

My impression is that it wouldn't help significantly; both GIF and PNG-based formats use lossless compression and aren't very suitable for video or time-lapse photo animations because they're a) bad at compressing the individual frames and b) bad at encoding the type of frame-to-frame differences you see with photographic images.

For video, an actual video codec (say Theora) will always do better; for slideshows or time-lapse photos where the individual frames aren't suitable for GIF/PNG, a series of JPEGs will do better -- animating them by JavaScript wouldn't be too hard. Animated SVG also has great potential for more diagrammatic types of animations... but we don't really have cross-browser support for them. :) --brion 16:44, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

At least for animated GIFs, this script at php.net looks promising. Whether or not the ability to block animated GIFs specifically would be desired, I dunno. ^demon 03:19, 4 June 2008 (UTC)