>I worked with the creator of GIF (Steve Wilhite) when I was still employed by CompuServe. Steve always pronounced it "jiff" and would correct those who pronounced it with a hard G. "Choosy developers choose GIF" (spinning off of a historically popular peanut butter commercial).
I'm pretty sure it's pronounced "ping" now since GIF is rolling slowly to the dustbin. Of course I'm sure the creator of the PNG format would say it's pronounced "pong". At least that would make sense. The whole jiff joke was never, ever funny.
The reason people use a hard G is because that's what makes sense given the wording of the acronym. Unless I've been pronouncing "graphics" wrong this whole time?
I use GIF pronunciation to tell how long someone has been on the Internet and precursors of the Internet. I got my first modem (300 baud Mitey Mo) in 1985 and I've seen this story come up at least 50 times since then.
If you've been on the Internet over 15 years then this will not be news to you. The other thing I find interesting about the GIF format is how everyone assumes it was designed for animation. I saw someone on reddit "knowingly" tell another redditor "oh yeah there can be non animated GIFs they just consist of a single frame of animation."
On old Macintosh systems, JPEG files would often be labeled "JFIF file"[1]. This created some confusion which I believe contributed to people adopting the hard G pronunciation.
Back during the dotcom boom, there was a joke: "We'll hire anyone who can spell GIF." At some point even the joke transitioned to a hard G sound. Some of us long ago decided to 'go with the flow'.
The 'G' sound in the word 'G-raphics' (GIF = Graphics Interchange Format) makes more sense to carry over to the acronym. I think the boats understandably sailed Mr.White!
Don't talk bad about GIF! GIF is a great format. Once upon a time I wrote a GIF89a library that supported animation, etc. I found it straightforward to parse and write, eminently extensible, with a clear and easy-to-read specification.
No one has been able to get their act together and propose a successful PNG animation format, but I'm disappointed that the "PNG in GIF" proposal never took off. Size wouldn't be so bad since most images would share a global color space, and browser makers could easily implement it.
Animation is now considered a core feature of GIF, but it was implemented as an extension by Netscape and surprisingly there is no official spec for it.
Extensibility is provided for in the specification, but the actual implementation within each application extension is, of course, application-specific.
The extensions I know about:
- NETSCAPE (animation)
- NETSCAPE (buffering)
- ANIMEXTS (same as Netscape animation)
- GIFCONnb (found this GIF Construction Set extension during testing but didn't try to reverse engineer it)
The only one of consequence is the animation one.
The page I used at the time to describe the animation extension no longer exists, but this page describes it and others:
Gib, short for giblet, the innards of a bird, can be (and is) pronounced both ways — "j"iblet and "g"iblet. Where I'm from, it's always been "j"iblet, but I wouldn't mind if someone pronounced it differently.
GIF will be around until there is another animated image format with decent support. APNG seems nice, but needs to be supported more. Personally, I like GIF. It's simple and can be included everywhere with a simple img tag. It's possible to animate with CSS, Javascript or video, but that's a lot more hassle and cannot be done in a comment box.
actually, the 'machine' is trained with a voice model. so, when you're saying that you'll let a machine decide, in this particular case you're really letting google decide (and expecting them to have baked in an appropriate pronunciation of gif).
the google translate tts models are older than their android models (particularly network tts), and it seem as though it still treats it similarly -> http://bit.ly/12tpCol
When he wrote in Latin, it was "Americus Vespucius". Martin Waldseemüller decided to name the continents after him on his 1507 map, using the feminized Latin version: "the Land of Americus, or America: since both Europa and Asia got their names from women" (thus, America holds the name it was given.) Amerigo was apparently never made aware that a continent had been named for him.
I used to pronounce it incorrectly, but my friend who built the NSFW site theworstdrug.com, which lets you click through the most popular GIFs on tumblr (hint they are all porn) enlightened me
There's something to say for ubiquity and convenience.
People would rather load a 50MB Animated GIF than watch a 10MB video of the same thing in higher res.
GIF, JPEG, PNG,... all these are not English words, so multiply possible pronunciations by a hundred (every Dutch speaking person I know pronounces them the Dutch way).
