I've used GIF animations for precisely the reasons mentioned in the article - I could create animations for the web without being forced to learn CGI scripting, and to reduce the load on the server.
Largely, I found the GIFs to work quite well and am pleased with the results. Gifbuilder makes it easy for me to take output from my raytracing software and turn it into a fantastic-looking animation.
However, I have been consistently annoyed that Netscape can't seem to run a looped GIF animation without continuously reminding the user, either on the status line or by blinking the stop button between red and grey or by forever running the loading "N" icon (depending on what platform you're using), that the GIF is being reloaded out of cache.
That wouldn't be such a big deal - the occasional flicker on the status line isn't more than a tiny annoyance - but people seem to be increasingly often creating two-frame "animations" which flicker back and forth continously, thus putting the browser in a permanent state of reloading from cache and making it flicker on the screen constantly. I find pages with these sorts of ultra-fast animations so annoying that I usually just go elsewhere rather than read them.
This bug was reported to Netscape several versions ago, but like most browser bugs, it has gone unresolved.
Anyway, as for server-push, I've never been able to understand why I would want to use it.
Meanwhile, I can't wait for Quicktime to become a universal web standard.
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