GIF Format

Often, we tend to minimize the importance of the images in the overall design of the site. Or if we believe in them, we do it from an aesthetic point of view. But the images are one of the most important components of a page. In fact, the images are what gives weight to the site, in terms of size of the file that occupies, measured in kilobytes or megbytes, because what weighs the code, i.e. the logical structure of the site is negligible. Consequently, the images that we can include in our design are crucial in determining the charging times.

Three are universally-supported formats: gif, jpeg, and png. Other formats such as bmp or tiff were quickly discarded, due to its excessive weight final. As sample values are relative to the resolution, i.e. the amount of points per inch, but as sample serves, a chart of 500 pixels by 375 pixels, in format png weighs 361 kb. The same file in gif format weighs 54,21 kb six times-, and in jpeg format 69,03 kb (barely a bit more than) in gif format) gif images are named for the first letters of its original name: Graphics Interchange Format. The format was created by a company called CompuServe beyond by 1987 (Compuserve, for the curious, was the first large internet service provider, in the Decade of the eighties). The idea was to create a format that would reduce the sizes of graphics files which hitherto were bmp (or bitmaps from there its name - or bitmaps), but without sacrificing image quality or amount of colors.

Gif format images came to be more compressed than the bmp, which was in a smaller size, to equal benefits. Achieving such a reduction was an imposition in moments in which the majority of users had with low-bandwidth connections, based on telephone modems, not exceeding 54 kilobytes per second. Another advantage of the GIF files is that they allow to achieve animated graphics. Nothing spectacular, do not think you will manage a film with a gif graphic, but you can reach small animations. An example are very clear the emoticons, those small little icons who greet, or comes an eye. With their limitations, they constitute an interesting possibility to achieve movement on a site. We will see in which case each format, and are comparative advantages.We continue with the explanations in the second part of this article.