Comment by account42
1 day ago
The major blunder here is browsers refusing to support silent videos in <img> tags etc. so we end up with all these hacks. Instead we got animated webp that you can't use for progressive enhancement because it doesn't have its own mime type and browsers reported support for image/webp before implementing animation support. And webp is also very limited when it comes to inter-frame compression for no good reason at all.
Gif doesn't mean "no sound" anymore. Gif is more or less "short video", which broke a lot of assumptions at first but we have pretty much passed that transition and it makes sense for what they are used for today.
That ship has sailed.
I ... what? I've never heard anyone conflate the two--not teenagers, non-technical adults, or software people. Most folks know that "GIF" means "moving image that can be easily shared but has no sound and usually crap quality", not a video/audio clip.
Gif certainly does mean no sound. Look at discord, telegram or literally any app that says “gif” and it’s no sound video.
Those are messaging/communication apps,sound in those apps can be quite disruptive so that doesn't surprise me at all. It has nothing to do with the original gif, it is just that gif is now synonymous with short clip (with or without sound) and sound in that context is disruptive.
Go to google.com, search for images and select image type gif and you will get mp4s with sound.
Telegram's usage of "GIF" (any short video without sound) is incredibly weird and frequently goes against users' expectations. I wouldn't treat that as definitive.