If you had told me ten years ago that animated gifs would be so big in 2014, I would have laughed at you: the format was already obsolete then, and surely in ten years we would have been able to develop a better format for delivering animation.
It is easy to under-estimate the legal intricacies of intellectual property and the corporate intrigue that results of this. The fact that it took years to come up with a tag to host video after two earlier ones (object
and embed
) did not help.
So in the end, the only thing that works is a format designed in 1989 that can be displayed in the <img>
tag.