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Comment by 7e | Hacker News Reader

I can’t wait for animated JPEG XL to replace animated GIF.

Animated AVIF is widely supported, and can represent GIFs losslessly.

BTW, Chrome vetoed the idea of supporting muted video files in `<img>` like Safari does, so we've got this silly animated AVIF that is a video format that has been turned into a still image format that has been turned back into a video format, which takes regular AV1 video data but packages it in a slightly different way, enough to break video tooling.

> Animated AVIF is widely supported, and can represent GIFs losslessly.

Doesn't lossless AVIF have terrible compression ratios?

You'd use lossless blocks for really simple pixel art that the GIF was made for. For GIFs made from video clips, you can apply regular video compression and decimate their size.

Well, most "GIFs" already really aren't that. Most image hosters already convert to and serve a silent looping h264 in it's place.

You could already use apng and the file size isn't too bad.

You may be waiting a while. APNG and animated WebP are already widely rolled out, but haven't replaced GIF.

Neither of these are well supported at all. APNG has a whole history of non-support by major browsers and animated WebP doesn't even have its own mime type so you can't fall back to gif/apng if support is not there - and support for webp does not guarantee support for animated webp. Both are also decidedly mediocre improvements over gif (which is quite the accomplishment considering how shit gif compression is).

Really, animated WebP has little reason to exist. At least the lossy version should really just be a video file with no audio track and a convention for the loop metadata. Too bad that browsers decided to create yet another format (with intentionally crippled compression compared to webm) rather than allow silent videos in <img> tags.

They're both probably decades ahead of JXL. APNG has 96% browser support on caniuse after a surprise come-from-behind on Apple.

The main reason for using GIF these days is you're on some platform where that's your only choice, so JXL is unlikely to change the status quo much.

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