Hi all,
The web-designers among you already know that using an animated asset in your web page design is a pain. We have GIF (supported by all browsers, but limited to 256 colors and 1bit transparency), animated PNG (supported by Firefox) and animated WebP (supported by Chrome).
If you actually want to have an animation with semi-transparency (smooth edges, something appearing or smoothly changing from one thing to another thing, ...) on your web page, you have a big problem. You have to serve different files to each browser.
Earlier this year, I made some command line tools for batch-converting gifs to animated pngs and webps and now I am thinking the opposite direction may actually be more useful. The scenario I am imagining is this:
* you create your animations in WebP or animated PNG using full colors and smooth transparency
* you run a command that coverts all WebP or PNG files to GIFs and places them into the same folders <- that would be the NANY
* you use browser-specific CSS hacks (or PHP) to serve the right files for the user's browser
* profit (max. quality of your design for as many people as possible)
So, what do you think, is it worth doing? Would you use it?
