The full form of GIF is Graphics Interchange Format. On June 15, 1987, a team at BBS (bulletin board service) provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite developed the GIF image format style bitmap. A GIF is a series of several bitmap files used to create an animated image. It is an eight-bit format that can accommodate up to 256 different colours. GIFs come in two varieties: 87a and 89a.
History of GIF
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CompuServe updated their outdated black and white RLE (Run-Length Encoding) format by introducing GIF on June 15, 1987, to provide their file download zone with a colour image format. GIF’s first iteration was known as 87a. An updated version of CompuServe dubbed 89a was released in 1989; it added translucent backdrop colours for animation delays and saved comprehensive metadata for a programme.
Use of GIF
- GIFs are appropriate for a small number of colours such as sharp-edged line art, like logos. It takes advantage of the the format’s lossy compression, favours large surfaces of well-defined edges of uniform colour.
- GIFs can be used for games to preserve low-colour sprite information.
- GIFs can be used on tiny animations and video clips of low resolution.