In the early days of HTML, the most hated tag was the <blink> tag, which made text under it blink. There were hardly any sensible uses for it, and a lot of browsers now disable it. I just tested it in this post, and WordPress actually deleted the tag from my draft when I tried to save it. (I approve!)
Today, though, the <blink> tag isn’t annoying enough. Now we have the animated GIF. It’s been around since the eighties, but for some reason it’s become much more prevalent recently. It’s the equivalent of waving a picture in your face while you’re trying to read something.
I can halfway understand it when it’s done in ads. Advertisers want to get your attention away from the page you’re reading and click on the link to theirs. What I don’t understand is why people use it in their own pages and user icons. It must be a desire to yell “Look how clever I am!!!” over and over again as the animation cycles.
Fortunately, some browsers provide an option to disable it. Firefox used to let you stop it with the ESC key, but last year removed this feature.
If you think that your web page is boring and adding some animated GIFs is just what’s needed to bring back the excitement — Don’t. Just don’t.
Update: I just discovered that a page that was driving me crazy because even disabling animated GIFs wouldn’t stop it was actually using the <marquee> tag. I believe that tag is banned by the Geneva Convention.
This is as much an excuse to plug one of my favorite satirical websites, the Babylon Bee, as anything else. They’ve got a mock-historical article claiming that the apostles Paul and Barnabas parted ways over the pronunciation of GIF. 
Mad File Format Science 
The great GIF pronunciation debate
Of all the issues in file formats, the pronunciation of “GIF” is surely close to the bottom in importance. When an issue is that minor, you can be sure everyone has strong opinions on it and will defend them on the barricades. It’s like the way political movements work: the closer together they are in their beliefs, the more ferociously they’ll vilify each other over little differences.
Personally, I always pronounce it my mind with a hard “G,” as in “give” rather than “giraffe.” I’m glad to see some support for this view in “A Linguist’s Guide to Pronouncing ‘GIF’.” One of its arguments matches the main reason in my mind: the “G” stands for “graphics,” which is pronounced with a hard “G.”
Case closed. Now can we agree that “PNG” is pronounced “Pee-Enn-Gee,” and not “Ping”?
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