I understand that they can be made to autoplay with no controls, but I don't even want the possibility of them being paused. This way the format has no choice but to behave as expected across everything.
I don't see why we can't use the IMG tag for video and the VIDEO tag for images. They should be unified, with all the same media formats supported.
IMG would autoplay, would not have sound, would loop, and would not have controls.
VIDEO would be the opposite. For something like a plain JPG or PNG file, it just shows the one frame. Animated GIF files would of course benefit from the controls.
The same should go for unification of the VIDEO and AUDIO tags. Play an audio file as video, and you get a black screen with sound. Play a video file as audio, and you just hear the sound.
They don't though. At similar quality and framerate, a video is much smaller than a GIF (so the radios can be shut down faster) and requires less power to playback (because it's offloaded to the hardware acceleration instead of being implemented entirely on the CPU).
Your average smartphone can play 1080p video without breaking a sweat, not so with 1080p gifs. Hell, a laptop will have permanent high-CPU usage on 1080p gifs, as a video it's background noise (https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/43rrf0/pixel_art_gif_a...)
The point is that they are more images than videos. They have no possible way to contain sounds so the annoyingness is limited to having unwanted images in your browser. You can tell your browser to block a particular still image. You can do the same thing to block a GIF. You don't need a pause/play feature on a 2-5 second sequence.
If that 2-5 second animated sequence is smack dab in the middle of an article I'm trying to read, because the author is trying to be "cool" and "in with the internets" by including some popular animated meme macro? You bet your bellybutton that I need to be able to stop it from distracting my eyes from the text.
Human sight has evolved to be attracted to movement.
There's nothing about allowing play/pause that prevents videos from behaving exactly like gifs. I've seen browsers with play/pause options for gifs, even.
The stop button used to stop all gifs on a page in firefox and internet explorer. Not sure if that was a bug or a feature though, since the stop button was generally not available when page load finished.
At least on Firefox, it was indeed stop. I believe it still works too, even though nowadays they hide the button, if you expose the functionality through an addon.
