I remember when animated Gif's where the coolest thing around. They were used everywhere... from a horizontal rule, to icons, to menu buttons to really annoying background animations on the whole webpage.

Then came Macromedia's Flash (now known as Adobe Flash), and swept the web animation world by storm. At first the whole website was designed in Flash, but people soon realized that it was hard to maintain and update content, let alone make dynamic content. So now we see a more elegant approach, where by using Flash only in the header or menus, and the rest of the page is either static/dynamic html content.

Flash is great for a website that has a few simple pages with static content. It can create an immersing experience and keep a users attention for a slightly longer period than a static HTML page. But try to make the Flash content dynamic, i.e. Blogs with comments or searching/search results, the model falls apart very quickly, making the site almost unusable. (Having to load a new flash file every page load?). There is a way to dynamically fetch data and deal with this problem in an elegent way, but the easier and more scalable route is HTML and server-side scripting.

Thus introducing APNG: Animated PNG (Portable Network Graphic) format.

Check out what the Mozilla guys are working on.

Also, if you are running Firefox 3, you can see these new formats at work.

This new format should fill the void that has been left between cheap 256 color animated gifs, and full blown Flash animation. These formats will be useful for things like animated buttons, logos where there is a need for transparency with and/or anti-aliasing.

But there is a down side to this...just like Flash is getting abused in giant ad-banner animations, pop-up ads and the like, advertisers will find a way to make the APNG just as annoying...you can count on that.

If you want to test this out and don't have Firefox 3 (beacuse it's still in beta), read my article here about how to run FF2 and FF3 beta simultaneously.