Web Review: The Bleeding Edge

By
Andrew Leonard

ast December, a guy in New York discovers a hitherto unknown way to create animations for Web pages. He posts the news to a couple of newsgroups in the comp.www.infosystems.* hierarchy. Some discussion ensues.
In mid-January, the discussion catches the attention of a trolling bystander who happens to be the chief technical officer of a well-regarded, San Francisco-based Web production house. He checks out the hack, decides it's a marked improvement over how his company has previously been handling animations, and alerts his colleagues with an in-house email message, giving it his seal of approval.
One of the recipients of the message is a Unix specialist who has been irritated that there is as yet no Shockwave implementation for Unix -- so he can't see all the cool Shockwave animations currently sprouting about the Net. He re-posts his boss' alert to a closed Shockwave mailing list, letting everyone there know that there is an alternative.
A subscriber to that mailing list copies the message over to a topic devoted to Netscape in the Web conference of the online service The Well. A number of Web developers regularly check this topic for the latest news, and one such developer decides to act. Within 24 hours, he's incorporated the animation technology on his own personal Web page.
And that's how the VRML logo on Jim Race's VRML page suddenly came to life two weeks ago -- a stunning example of the Net at its best. No PR blitzes, no press releases, no orchestration of hype whatsoever required. Just the Net in all its circuitous, word-of-digital- mouth glory -- a case study of grassroots action in the information age.

Royal Frazier is the man who got the animated ball rolling in December. But real credit for the GIF animation breakthrough belongs to Heiner Wolf, a German programmer at the University of Ulm.
In February of 1995, Wolf and some colleagues were experimenting with a project aimed at putting a model railroad on the Web. A key goal, says Wolf via email, was finding a way to animate the pages.
"[We wanted] some method to overwrite images on pages by newer ones. You can imagine my surprise when we looked into the GIF89a specification from Compuserve. It contained all we needed. Multiple images, difference images, and infinite image sequences. We just had to encode a sequence of GIF subimages on the fly."
But back then, no available browser supported the full GIF specification. So Wolf, a regular attender of Web-related conferences, decided to get the word out.
"I told my GIF story in '95 anytime someone asked about inline animation," he says.
Finally, Netscape bit. Scott Furman, a programmer responsible for imaging-related code, told Wolf that he would make sure Netscape Navigator supported the full range of possibilities for GIF89a.
Netscape did not decide, however, to make the news public. So despite Wolf's efforts, the greater Net community still remained in the GIF animation dark. Enter Royal Frazier.
One night in December, while playing around with the shareware program Gif Constructor Set, Frazier (independently of Wolf) discovered the animation possibilities built into the GIF89a spec. And when he peered his creation through the lens of a few popular browsers, he found that only Netscape 2.0b3 ran the animation.
Lucky for the Web. Because although there's no shortage of animation action on the Web right now -- Shockwave, of course; a new arrival, Sizzler from Totally Hip software which allows "streaming animation;" and good old Java, continuing to plod its way along -- there are some good reasons to embrace GIF animations.

First, in a single stroke, GIF89a animations transform the old way of doing low tech animations, "server push," into a moribund technology -- roadkill on the info highway. Frazier argues that Web server administrators are bound to prefer GIF89a animations over server push animations.
With a server push animation, the server is constantly pushing out new images to the client -- creating a steady stream of data going back and forth that sucks energy away from other concurrent processes such as FTP downloads. With a GIF89a animation, all the relevant information is downloaded to the client right at the beginning, forcing the client to do all the work. The speed of the animation is then determined by the size of its individual GIFs and how many horses the client processor has working.
Second, anybody can do it. You don't need a $1,000 Director program from Macromedia to create the animation, or have the years of experience in C++ programming necessary to hack a decent Java applet. Jim Race created his VRML logo animation (borrowing the GIFs from digital artist and all around tech god Kevin Hughes) in half an hour.
Third, no special software or configuration is necessary to see a GIF89a animation. No plug-ins required. All you need is a recent version of Netscape. So Web crawlers can expect to see GIF animations springing up everywhere, without their having to lift a finger.

The only potential drawback, notes Frazier, is that the GIF format is technically proprietary. The collective memory of the Web no doubt well remembers Unisys' petulant attempt to suddenly start collecting royalties for GIF use last summer. So if you're looking to make money off, say, creating animated advertisements using GIF89a technology, you may be walking on thin ice. And unfortunately, the much-touted replacement for the GIF format, PNG, does not yet permit the same kind of animation hack. Nor does the JPEG format, which many Web designers prefer for its superior compression technology.
Nevertheless, the response to Frazier's discovery has been "extremely enthusiastic," says Frazier with a chuckle. So much so, in fact, that Frazier's been forced to scramble for mirror sites for his GIF89a Web pages, which at last count were at 2,000 hits a day and rising.
The Web pages, which include a tutorial on how to create GIF89a animations and a steadily burgeoning gallery of links to GIF animation art, are in turn funneling a sizable hit stream to other locations. Within hours of notifying Frazier of his new GIF-animated VRML logo, Race found his pages getting pounded by visitors.
But that's what you get when you dive into the flow of the Net's digital torrent -- a bracing shock that's good for you. As the Web races toward commercialization and high tech, proprietary software formats, it's refreshing to see that the core grassroots energy of the Net still thrives. We can only wonder, what's next?

Andrew Leonard is Web Review's technology editor and a contributor to Wired and other national publications.