Was I wrong to defend animated GIFs over video files on my old Geocities page?

Back in '97, a classmate told me my site loaded slow because I used like 50 dancing baby GIFs instead of a single Quicktime clip. I argued GIFs were more reliable since nobody had fast internet anyway, but now I wonder if they were right. Did anyone else get flak for sticking with 8-bit animation over real video back then, and did you ever switch it up?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_cora7d ago

Oh man, those dancing baby GIFs were a rite of passage - my site had them doing the Macarena next to a "Under Construction" sign, which definitely added at least 10 minutes to load times. Loading 50 of those little guys was like asking a dial-up modem to run a marathon in flip-flops. Did you ever try making your own GIFs with something like GIF Construction Set, or was it purely clip-art chaos?

campbell.nora7d ago

Wait, is loading a few GIFs really that deep? I mean yeah dial up was slow but we were all in the same boat back then. I made my own GIFs with some freeware program I downloaded off a CD from a magazine, it was janky as hell but it worked. People act like having a dancing baby on your site was a war crime or something, it was just fun. You could also just right click and save someone elses GIFs if you didnt wanna make your own, nobody cared about that back then. It was the wild west of the internet, not that serious lol.