GIF history
Posted on April 22, 2002 @ 18:58 in Research
In an article I'm writing I make an offhand reference to animated GIFs and the blink tag being all the rage back in 1995 and I end up doing a little digging. So here's a quick account of the journey.
GIF Info is a comprehensive site about the GIF image format. According to this information image-animation was not originally a part of the spec, but it was added by Netscape as an extension in the 2.02 browser and later incorporated in the GIF87a spec, with speed control implemented in the GIF89a spec. Now this begs the question when the Netscape 2.02 browser was released. So with a bit more digging I found this timeline of computer history, that says the 1.0 version of Netscape was released in 1994 and the 2.02 version in 1996.
So we didn't actually have animated GIFs in 1995? Only from 1996 onwards? Phew! I'm not going to try to find out when the tag was introduced, this already took me way too much time. Some links though I found while searching:
Netscape 2.02, you can still download it!
Netscape 2.02 release notes, in case you were wondering what changed from the 1.1 release.
The GIF Controversy, a historical account of the controversy that ensued when Compuserve and Unisys decided to enforce their patents on the GIF format and levy a tax on the use of GIF images... remember?! That was a big deal back in the day!
Yahoo's entry for GIF and Webopedia's entry.
W3.org HTML home page, HTML 2.0 became a standard in 1996, only to be superseded the same year by HTML 3.2.
A short history of animated GIFs, not to be taken too seriously I recon.
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"Phew! I'm not going to try to find out when the blink tag was introduced...."
The blink tag was originated by the Netscape folks, and was there at least as early as version 0.9, which I remember testing in 1993 or 1994.
I'm pretty sure the coder who came up with the blink tag was the same guy who was responsible for the Amazing Fishcam.
Posted by msk on May 15, 2002 @ 23:33
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