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Comment by SahAssar

1 day ago

Videos and images are treated very differently by browsers and OS:es. I'm guessing the better suggestion would be to use apng or animated avif if you are looking for a proper gif alternative.

Do browsers support progressive enhancement from gif to animated avif without javascript? The royally messed that up for animated webp.

  • Yes, by using the <picture> element with <source> elements declaring the individual formats with the last one being a regular <img> with the gif.

    Or you could use content-negotiation to only send avif when it's supported, but IMO the HTML way with <picture> is perhaps clearer for the client and end user.

    I think the webp problem was due to browsers supporting webp but not supporting animation, transparency or other features, so content negotiation based on mime types (either via <picture> or HTTP content-negotiation) did not work properly. Safari 16.1-16.3 has the same problem with AVIF, but that is a smaller problem than it was with webp.