Oh wow the last time this subject came up was so long ago, I think it was on my original thread.
I'm assuming animated gifs, if I'm wrong then this is a long post for not much at all.
Rowley's reasoning is quite valid. These pages are heavy. File size and loading times are real issues and gifs can be resource hungry with many of them all going at once. Also I don't want mixed formats jpg, gif, png, etc (see end of post as to why).
But there is another reason. I think I'm fairly open to suggestions, and there are features that I have added, not because I like them or because I think they are good, but because others like them. It's pretty rare that I'll say I'm not doing that because I don't like it. But...
If I'm to be completely honest, I'm not doing it because I don't like it. I know many forums have them, and I think it doesn't work well. The less animations the better imo. I don't mean the content that's posted (well that too in some cases) I mean the page that houses content should be free of distraction and have good readability.
I really like avatars, custom and official ones. I'm active on other forums too, and I've come to depend on avatars, it's how I recognise a familiar contributor. But I think if they were animated it would look like a circus.
Why png and not other image formats.
As far as formats themselves go, pretty much anything can be used. I chose png for a few reasons. They have an alpha channels (variable transparency, gif doesn't), have reasonable compression and maintain good image quality. Png uses lossless encoding with direct colour (many thousands of colours compared to 256 for gifs). No one has to sacrifice image quality.
A single format is a must, the avatar codes don't need to include the format. That's a big plus. Single format means I can run all the images through the same process (I extract all pixel data and dump that into a transparent template and save it, leaving non pixel data behind). Processing is easy
03-Mar-2015 13:19:02
- Last edited on
03-Mar-2015 15:57:22
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Indecent Act
