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– Ponderings & code by Drew McLellan –

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GIF patent

12 June 2003

June 20, 2003 is the international day of the GIF. Or at least it should be, as in a week’s time the US Patent on LZW compression (essentially read: GIF image format) expires. Woo flippin’ hoo!

What does this mean? It means that the good folk who produce the web development and graphics tools we all use on a daily basis can once again include support for the GIF file format without having to pay Unisys (the owners of the patent) a bucket-load of cash. It means that open source projects that simply don’t have a bucket-load of cash can include support for GIF in their software should they choose. It means that the democratic web won, in a sense. We came through unscathed.

What doesn’t it mean? It doesn’t mean that the GIF format is any better than it ever was, and that PNG is still the format of choice for the future. Unfortunately, PNG support is still incomplete in the browsers most people are using, so GIF wins out through the shear weight of its support.

I was thinking about holding a GIF party next Friday, but that’d be a little geeky, don’t ya think?

- Drew McLellan

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Comments

  1. § Rachel: .. a GIF party would be good - we could all dress as our favourite animated gifs ... I want to be the rotating ’e’.
  2. § Drew: I think I’d be the hand that reaches out of the mailbox to catch the arriving mail.

    You've got mail!
  3. § Nathan Pitman: I’ll be the 1 pixel transaprent GIF. :)
  4. § Drew: Are you trying to say you’re not going to come, Nat? ;)
  5. § Owen: I would just have to be that piece of paper that folds itself up into an envelope and whoosh! flies off.
  6. § Lach: No, the best animated gif would be the rotating skull that I used liberally on my first ever web page. ;)

    Thankfully that web page is no longer in existence.
  7. § Nathan Pitman: Oh I’ll be there, you’ll find by the in the kitchen, and every now and again I’ll become really long and thin, or very short and fat.
  8. § Nathan Pitman: Hmm, ok, your comment code snipped out half my sentence...

    ’...you’ll find me by the table...’ ;)

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About Drew McLellan

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Drew McLellan (@drewm) has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

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