Demystifying: The GIF Format

We've all seen GIF files being used. They're the internet's go-to for animated imagery. I've never actually looked into the specification until recently, and I've found that it's a pretty simple file format. This makes GIF a perfect candidate for what’s becoming a recurring “Demystifying” series here.

In this article, we're going to dive into how GIF files are encoded, and some interesting quirks of the format.

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Demystifying Lossless File Compression

The Idea

We all know the basic idea of file compression. We see ZIP files regularly, and know how to extract and compress them. Although most everyone knows how to use these compressed files, and understand that compressing files makes them smaller, most people have no idea how it works technically.

Though this may seem like magic, it's a fairly straightforward concept. In this article, we are going to be demystifying file compression.

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