??? It’s a weird way to put it, but okay.
I’d say the looping animated medium of communication went from .gif files and forums to full-on platforms hitting billions today.
Not really a deathbed.
A visual reaction to anything is whatever is doing it best (smileys, emojis, “GIFs”, “TikToks”, a static picture), regardless of its technical side (.gif files, .mp4 containers, .png/jpg or video stream from Giphy).
It’s funny how we say that words are important and then we conflate technical acronyms with culture, lol. Anyway.
The truly interesting thing about that format of communication, is that no engineer and developer really ever “got” it. It’s so wild! Specs are:
- Lossless and lossy image and sound
- Perfect loop
- Perfect sync of audio
No existing tech does it. Gifs don’t have sound. MP4s don’t loop well. .webp is some bullshit. APNG are nonexistent and without sound either? Just sad.
Mind you, any 5 year old hardware is capable of playing 100s of simultaneous loops of video and sound perfectly synchronized, in real time.
I understand; it is far more lucrative to anally probe hundreds of millions of people through their phones constantly, than to invent a file format that does it all, empowering folks with designer tools and APIs that everyone would be able to use, native support in OSes, etc.
I get that.