Recently the company I work for had an exchange of banners. We let them put up one banner on our site and they let us put up one theirs. When asked for the material I sent an animated flash banner and got the answer back that their banner rotating system only was compatible with animated gifs and other image formats. The had some reason for this compatible issue. Their arguments follows

• Not all people can view flash files in their browser.
• It is an easy system, and everyone else of our clients is using it.
• You need some external player for flash files while gifs and other pictures does not.

While it is true that some people can't view flash content in their browser or the compiled flash file is sometime of a different version than the player, flash player penetration is very high reaching 98% more than Windows Media Player, Java and Quicktime. Flash player version 6 has penetration on mature markets of 98.3%, Flash player 7 97.3%, Flash player 8 94.2% and Flash player 9 55.8%. So much for the compatibility issue. The remaining 1.7% must be seen as very marginal and my belief is that their numbers are dwindling.

As for the easiness of gif animations I can agree to some extent that coding a page with images is a bit easier than implementing a flash file as there are more code to write and more parameters to set. However the difficulties in creating the gif animation way supersedes this problem. The production is very inefficient but fortunately you can create gif animations with Flash.

The main problem with the gif animation is the lack of animation - basically it is just a bunch of still gifs. The richness of the flash medium, its endless programming possibilities and almost user friendly interface should make us forget the archaic and tedious task of gif animation.

It is time to once and for all put the gif animation to sleep in the junk yard of the web.

- Thanks gif animation it has been nice time with many memories, but it is time to go to sleep. The future belongs to Flash. (And strangely enough I am writing this in 2007 when I should have been writing it in 2000)