A new PNG spec

So animated GIFs can be replaced by Animated PNGs with alpha blending with transparent backgrounds and lossless compression! Some nostalgia from 2000s websites can be revived and relived :)

Curious if Animated SVGs are also a thing. I remember seeing some Javascript based SVG animations (it was a animated chatbot avatar) - but not sure if there is any standard framework.

I was under the impression many gifs these days are actually served as soundless videos, as those basically compress better.

Can animated PNG beat av1 or whatever?

Its also because people like to "pause" animations, and that is not really an option with apng & gif.

why not? that's up to the program displaying the animation, not the animation itself -- i'm sure a pausable gif or apng display program is possible

It's absolutely possible. Browsers even routinely pause playback when images aren't visible on screen.

They just don't have a proper UI and JS APIs exposed, and there's nothing stopping them from adding that.

IMO browsers are just stuck with tech debt, and maintainin a no-longer-relevant distinction between "animations" and "videos". Every supported codec should work wherever GIF/APNG work and vice versa.

It's not even a performance or complexity issue, e.g. browsers support AVIF "animations" as images, even though they're literally fully-featured AV1 videos, only wrapped in a "pretend I'm an image" metadata.

I wish browsers still paused all animations when the user hits the Esc key. It's hard to read when there are distracting animations all over most pages.