November 5, 1999. It was a historic day for those who have a grudge on GIFs, as it was Burn All GIFs Day. On that memorable Friday, the game plan was laid out as plainly as its name says: "On Burn All GIFs Day, all GIF users will gather at Unisys and burn all their GIF files." Alongside this declaration are PNG files — proudly anti-GIF.
Despite the obvious joke of setting files on fire, acknowledged with a winking plea to "extinguish all GIFs before leaving the vicinity," the anger was real and the mission was earnest: to free the web from the scourge of the GIF once and for all.
But it seems that they were not successful in their mission. Up until this day, the GIF still lives, and it rules the Internet.
Find out more about this over at Popular Mechanics.
Long live the GIF!
(Image Credit: Popular Mechanics)
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While gifs didn't go away, the outcry did establish PNG as a widely supported web image format. Unfortunately, PNGs don't do animations. The patents on GIFs expired before an alternative could be established... much like MP3s. These days, HTML5 video is starting to obsolete the gif for those little animations, because videos can be much smaller.
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