GIF?

When many people think of GIFs, they think of animated ones, that reference a television show or something like that, and that convey a mood…

Horatio from CSI: Miami TV show. Used to convey something similar to a mic drop?

Fry from Futurama TV show. Used to convey uncertainty or suspicion.

But it wasn’t always this way. GIF is a file format that stands for Graphics Interchange Format.

It’s a little odd that typing “gif” into a search engine doesn’t tell you this in the first handful of results. Instead, you get results for animated gif sites like Giphy and Tenor.

There has been much debate around how “gif” is pronounced. There’s even a Wikipedia page about it. But it seems that an overwhelming majority of people pronounced it with a hard “g”. Gif, not “jif”.

A while back, on the web, I recall people referring to GIFs when they wanted something animated.

joobot from joobots

emoticons I used to use on my blog (which gave people quite the conniption when I decided to remove them in favour of text and emoji)

Or even before we figured out animated stuff, just making backgrounds transparent. 🥲 (cos fuck .bmp lol)

emoticons I made and put for free download on my site

my famous tofu cubes

But the best of all, the spacer gif… a 1×1 pixel transparent gif used to control layout when HTML/CSS were not so developed. I can’t believe I had to create this. I could not find one on the internet to download. 🤣

a spacer gif: a 1×1 pixel transparent image (yeah have fun seeing that)

Maybe this is more helpful:

a spacer gif with a red border around it

Or perhaps this:

a 100×100 pixel area with a repeating background image of a spacer gif, with a red border around it