GIF is a file format from the 80s. Did you know it was that old? Its older than I am. Wow! GIF kind of sucks, but I still use it. I guess I'm just used to it. More modern image formats don't have the shimmer and crust. There's no good reason to use GIF, literally no advantages and only downsides. GIF is entirely obsolete. I've got the millennial GIF brain sickness.

JPG is famous for compression artifacts. In the late 00s and early 10s these artifacts were infamous enough to be memetic, like deep fried images and the degradation of compression as memes were passed from forums to forums to go die on reddit (the Internet's asshole, where tired shit gets shat) to go decompose on Facebook (the human centipede of the internet).

The web era where your options were GIF or JPG is a big part of the 90s aesthetic shaped by file formats. Pick your poison.

I like the small web that isn't a nostalgic throwback, I love seeing people using modern markup and web formats to the fullest. Its why all the ignorant old web pastiches don't fucking suck - HTML 4.1 was what sucked and its best to do something new. If your goal is a nostalgic throwback though, you need to stick to the GIF/Medium Quality JPEG binary. Its one of the little check boxes that'll destroy otherwise authentic looking pastiche.

PNG had a slow adoption, but it was taken up. Burn All GIFs is one of my favorite retro sites (burnallgifs.org). People loved PNG and its easy to see why, when you look at GIF vs JPG binary that came before. You get the clarity of GIF without colour restrictions, you get the rich colour detail of JPG without the artifacts.

Have you ever seen a modern social media platform shit itself when fed a static GIF? Modern sites want to apply video compression to GIFs, which is fair enough. But since the web long ago moved on from static GIFs, website recompression doesn't expect them. Its both funny and infuriating to see them fuck up this image format from the 80s.

People are coming around on WebP and its easy to see why. WebP is a good file format, one that is a synthesis of the best parts of GIF+JPEG+PNG and with smaller file sizes to boot. Its also easy to be cynical of WebP. It was invented by Google engineers, so you gotta be sus of Google I guess? Well its a bit silly, it is an open source project, but I don't fault skepticism. Since WebP has so many advantages, I do use it.

JPEGXL shows a lot of promise. It does all the fun stuff WebP does, but also deals with HDR images. It retains progressive image decoding as a feature - one of the best features of JPEG that PNG doesn't do. It would be so exciting for um... Load Times... If progressive decoding was widespread. Its on its way to be widely adopted by browsers, and I hope it gets picked up faster than WebP was. It would be funny for WebP to be hated for 15 years, get a real 15 minutes of positivity, before being superseded instantly.

Is "animated jpeg" a cursed concept. Should we have tech optimism for "animated jpeg".