An Honor for the Creator of the GIF

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/an-honor-for-the-creator-of-the-gif/?smid=tw-nytimes

by fjordan • 13 years ago

56 52 13 years ago

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

aroch• 13 years ago

Reminds me of this page: http://www.olsenhome.com/gif/

Which has, conservatively, been around forever

>I worked with the creator of GIF (Steve Wilhite) when I was still employed by CompuServe. Steve always pronounced it "jiff" and would correct those who pronounced it with a hard G. "Choosy developers choose GIF" (spinning off of a historically popular peanut butter commercial).

mcmSEA• 13 years ago

"that's Frahn-ken-steen."

krapp2• 13 years ago

I don't care what the creator of the format says. I'm using the hard g.

jamespitts• 13 years ago

I'll keep mispronouncing it too, but will stop needlessly arguing with the silent-g zealots.

wging• 13 years ago

There are no silent-g zealots. No one pronounces it 'if' :)

krapp2• 13 years ago

It's not mispronunciation. The author and the internet are merely misinformed.

nickhalfasleep• 13 years ago

The only thing pronounced is how aged and antiquated the format is.

kibibu• 13 years ago

There's something to say for ubiquity and convenience. People would rather load a 50MB Animated GIF than watch a 10MB video of the same thing in higher res.

softbuilder2• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure it's pronounced "ping" now since GIF is rolling slowly to the dustbin. Of course I'm sure the creator of the PNG format would say it's pronounced "pong". At least that would make sense. The whole jiff joke was never, ever funny.

The reason people use a hard G is because that's what makes sense given the wording of the acronym. Unless I've been pronouncing "graphics" wrong this whole time?

rmrfrmrf• 13 years ago

giraffics.

300bps3• 13 years ago

>slowly to the dustbin

Slowly is a bit of an understatement. The format has been in widespread use for a quarter century.

softbuilder2• 13 years ago

I'm an optimist? :)

sillysaurus• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure it's pronounced "ping" now since GIF is rolling slowly to the dustbin.

PNG can't be used to make animations. GIF can. That alone is enough to ensure GIF will be around for a long, long time.

IbJacked• 13 years ago

It's not universally supported, but there is an animated png format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APNG

maxmcd2• 13 years ago

I'm still hoping for the rise of <video> tag based "gifs". Better compression, sound as an option. Vine provides a decent attempt at this.

mikeevans• 13 years ago

WebP also supports animations, don't know how that compares to GIF though.

bonjourmr• 13 years ago

The 'G' sound in the word 'G-raphics' (GIF = Graphics Interchange Format) makes more sense to carry over to the acronym. I think the boats understandably sailed Mr.White!

300bps3• 13 years ago

What about JPEG then? Should that be pronounced JPHEG since it stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group.

aptwebapps• 13 years ago

That's how I'm rollin' from now on.

richtr• 13 years ago

It is pronounced 'Wilhite' not 'White'.

300bps3• 13 years ago

I use GIF pronunciation to tell how long someone has been on the Internet and precursors of the Internet. I got my first modem (300 baud Mitey Mo) in 1985 and I've seen this story come up at least 50 times since then.

If you've been on the Internet over 15 years then this will not be news to you. The other thing I find interesting about the GIF format is how everyone assumes it was designed for animation. I saw someone on reddit "knowingly" tell another redditor "oh yeah there can be non animated GIFs they just consist of a single frame of animation."

untog• 13 years ago

I've been on the internet for nearly 20 and didn't know. How would I find out? I wasn't aubscribed to alt.pronunciationpedantry

flomo• 13 years ago

On old Macintosh systems, JPEG files would often be labeled "JFIF file"[1]. This created some confusion which I believe contributed to people adopting the hard G pronunciation.

Back during the dotcom boom, there was a joke: "We'll hire anyone who can spell GIF." At some point even the joke transitioned to a hard G sound. Some of us long ago decided to 'go with the flow'.

[1] This was due to a freeware program called JPEGView, which was often set up as the default viewer for .JPG files. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG_File_Interchange_Format

joonix• 13 years ago

And it's "Amerigo," according to Vespucci.

lotharbot• 13 years ago

When he wrote in Latin, it was "Americus Vespucius". Martin Waldseemüller decided to name the continents after him on his 1507 map, using the feminized Latin version: "the Land of Americus, or America: since both Europa and Asia got their names from women" (thus, America holds the name it was given.) Amerigo was apparently never made aware that a continent had been named for him.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerigo_Vespucci , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Waldseem%C3%BCller , and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_of_America#Etymology_and...

MattGrommes• 13 years ago

I personally don't care which pronunciation you use. As long you understand it's 'gib', not 'jib' when you blow somebody into pieces.

/me ducks

adregan2• 13 years ago

Same problem as GIF.

Gib, short for giblet, the innards of a bird, can be (and is) pronounced both ways — "j"iblet and "g"iblet. Where I'm from, it's always been "j"iblet, but I wouldn't mind if someone pronounced it differently.

NelsonMinar• 13 years ago

As everyone knows, GIF stands for "Giraffe Interchange Format". Hence the pronunciation. Demonstration: http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7vg5p6c4u1r4ss8fo1_400.gi...

freshyill• 13 years ago

Perhaps this will help: http://howdoyoupronouncegif.com

kps• 13 years ago

The creators of SCSI wanted it to be pronounced ‘sexy’ (SeCSI). Tough luck.

armenarmen• 13 years ago

I used to pronounce it incorrectly, but my friend who built the NSFW site theworstdrug.com, which lets you click through the most popular GIFs on tumblr (hint they are all porn) enlightened me

mratzloff2• 13 years ago

Don't talk bad about GIF! GIF is a great format. Once upon a time I wrote a GIF89a library that supported animation, etc. I found it straightforward to parse and write, eminently extensible, with a clear and easy-to-read specification.

No one has been able to get their act together and propose a successful PNG animation format, but I'm disappointed that the "PNG in GIF" proposal never took off. Size wouldn't be so bad since most images would share a global color space, and browser makers could easily implement it.

ftp://ftp.simplesystems.org/pub/png-group/documents/history/png-in-gif-proposal-20070413.txt

grapjas• 13 years ago

What resources did you use to implement gif89a?

You already mentioned the specification ( http://www.w3.org/Graphics/GIF/spec-gif89a.txt ). Did you use anything else?

mratzloff2• 13 years ago

Animation is now considered a core feature of GIF, but it was implemented as an extension by Netscape and surprisingly there is no official spec for it.

Extensibility is provided for in the specification, but the actual implementation within each application extension is, of course, application-specific.

The extensions I know about:

- NETSCAPE (animation)

- NETSCAPE (buffering)

- ANIMEXTS (same as Netscape animation)

- GIFCONnb (found this GIF Construction Set extension during testing but didn't try to reverse engineer it)

The only one of consequence is the animation one.

The page I used at the time to describe the animation extension no longer exists, but this page describes it and others:

http://www.vurdalakov.net/misc/gif

adregan2• 13 years ago

If you want to be well liked, don't ever be the person who directly corrects other's pronunciation of words.

nirvanatikku2• 13 years ago

'jif'? what!? http://qkme.me/3uig7w

kmm• 13 years ago

GIF will be around until there is another animated image format with decent support. APNG seems nice, but needs to be supported more. Personally, I like GIF. It's simple and can be included everywhere with a simple img tag. It's possible to animate with CSS, Javascript or video, but that's a lot more hassle and cannot be done in a comment box.

D9u2• 13 years ago

I used to say "Ihm-grr" (imgur.com) instead of "Ihm-jer" so I guess I can learn to say "Jiff."

rangibaby• 13 years ago

It's not image-er? ;-(

D9u2• 13 years ago

Yes, your pronunciation is correct.

lazugod• 13 years ago

It's pronounced "bikeshed".

Scryptonite• 13 years ago

I'd let a machine decide.

http://translate.google.com/#en/en/GIF%20or%20JIF...%0Agif%2....

Google's Text-to-Speech seems to pronounce it with a Soft G.

nirvanatikku2• 13 years ago

actually, the 'machine' is trained with a voice model. so, when you're saying that you'll let a machine decide, in this particular case you're really letting google decide (and expecting them to have baked in an appropriate pronunciation of gif).

here's what we've got at nuance: GIF or JIF -> http://bit.ly/1938drD.

the google translate tts models are older than their android models (particularly network tts), and it seem as though it still treats it similarly -> http://bit.ly/12tpCol

vytasgd• 13 years ago

The dancing baby that started it all... I can't believe that was 17 years ago...

Luc• 13 years ago

GIF, JPEG, PNG,... all these are not English words, so multiply possible pronunciations by a hundred (every Dutch speaking person I know pronounces them the Dutch way).

workbench• 13 years ago

As if they chose that stupid derivative yahoo GIF to headline this.

An Honor for the Creator of the GIF

Related Stories