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Peanut butter brand Jif has put forth their opinion on how to pronounce GIF.
From their website(warning, lots of animated GIFs):
When is it OK to call a Gif a "Jif"? Never.
Jif® is peanut butter. GIFs are
looping animations.
SNACK ON THAT.
That would be all well and good except for just one thing. The person who actually created the format, Steve Wilhite, explicitly stated GIF was to be pronounced with a soft "G"!
From a 1997 edition of the NetBITS newsletter, down near the bottom of the page appears:
It's "Jiff" and I Don't Want to Hear Another Word -- Logic may dictate the "g" in GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) is pronounced hard, like gift or gefilte fish, but that didn't stop dozens and dozens of readers from offering opinions, many of them hilarious.
However, several people wrote to say that they either worked with folks at CompuServe or read the original GIF specification, all of which specified a soft "g". None of us at NetBITS understand why we haven't seen the definitive word before, so here it is. Charlie Reading <charlier@kreber.com> writes:
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).
An article at Ars Technica actually queries professional linguists in pursuit of the ultimate answer.
See this Sesame Street-like GIF which mentions popular words that start with a soft G such as Giant and Giraffe.
Lastly, here is a short video (1m18s) with what is quite possibly the strongest affirmation of all. David Karp presents Steve Wilhite with the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award at the 17th Annual Webbys where Steve dramatically uses a GIF as his acceptance 'speech' and sets the matter straight once and for all.
Not that it settles anything. The debate will rage on like vi vs. Emacs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 27 2020, @01:09PM (2 children)
ouch!
why the heck would anyone want javascript in a picture format!
Now I have to look for info about that security problem too :-(
I assume the browser (palemoon on my own computer) normally won't run those scripts either since I normally have javascript turned off, but sometimes I do turn on javascript for a page - how do I make sure it never ever run scripts in svg-pictures?
and here I was hoping browsers support of svg was a problem solved...
But I guess people can use png for their logos/icons/linedrawings instead, while we wait some 18 more years or so for vectorgraphics in browsers.
If I'm not completely mistaken some websites do a really horribly thing of pushing their own special fonts on you for their icons :-(
so now you can't block their ugly fonts or the symbols break.... blaeh!!!!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday February 27 2020, @01:30PM (1 child)
You can do some fun things with JavaScript in SVG.
Is sanitizing it really that hard? All of the scripting should be contained in script elements or a handful of attributes (onload, onclick...).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday February 27 2020, @04:38PM
Proposal to the W3C to bless a new SVG extension that allows native code as alternative to JavaScript.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.