Google should have called it JIF, not WebP

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org⁩ to ⁨showerthoughts@lemmy.world⁩

WebP does everything GIF did, just better. The only problem is adoption. Maybe a similar, single-syllable name could have helped.

Ends the pronunciation debate: hard G in the 1987 filetype, soft G in the 2010 one
Looping soundless video gets a name that’s short and does not refer to a terribly inefficient format (that “gif” sharing sites often no longer use anyway), plus some wrong people have been using it already
Software peer-pressured into supporting it (nobody wants to hear “they don’t support JIF” about their software)

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Comments

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_stranger_@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Ok, but the J stands for “Google”

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- smiletolerantly@awful.systems ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  How does it feel to have the objectively best sense of humor?
  
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  - _stranger_@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Image
    
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  - LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Okay so Jif for shorthand and Joojif for the full spelling. Just to make a call to their original misspelling of Googol
    
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themeatbridge@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
You’ll never end the debate about how to pronounce Gif. Homophones exist.

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- null@lemmy.nullspace.lol ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Homophonia is a huge issue
  
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  - themeatbridge@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Have coarse wee dew knot wont two bee band buy Maudes fore braking roules.
    
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- Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Jraphics Interchange Format
  
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  - dosboy0xff@infosec.pub ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Sure, but for consistency you also have to pronounce JPEG as “jay-feg”.
    
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  - themeatbridge@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Self-Contained Uoonderwater Breathing Apparatus
    
    Light Aimplification by Ztimulated Uhmission of Radiation
    
    Acronyms do not work that way!
    
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- ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  There’s a pronunciation guide in the original documentation
  
  And it was WRONG
  
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  - themeatbridge@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    There is no wrong. English doesn’t have wrong pronunciations. You’re either understood or you aren’t. There’s the original pronunciation, and there’s the new pronunciation. Both are used, so neither is wrong.
    
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- partial_accumen@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  
  There’s a pronunciation guide in the original documentation, and that didn’t end the debate.
  
  Humans are even more horrible that this first glance suggests. Imagine, one day, the debate truly ends and a single pronunciation for GIF is universally established and recognized by everyone. A group of humans will start to intentionally mispronounce it (or misspell it) just for the aggravation it will generate in others or for their own amusement.
  
  This is where the meme-like behavior of deliberately misspelling the popular phrase (at the time) “all correct” as “oll korrect”. This was later abbreviated as “o.k.” and then eventually “ok”. A phrase we likely use dozens or hundreds of times a day is meme-speak from 1839. source
  
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  - Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Thanks for that link, I’ve long wondered the origin of OK!
    
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- WindyRebel@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  So what you’re saying it’s that just like articles—THEY DIDN’T READ. Then they perpetuated fake news until it was accepted by half the audience.
  
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  - themeatbridge@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    More than half. Less than 25% of people use the original pronunciation of gif, and two people in this thread have repeated the absurd misconceptions that popularized the new pronunciation.
    
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Stillwater@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Jif already exists (at least it did long ago…)

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- ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  That is just another extension for the image/jpeg MIME type, and can be reclaimed.
  
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Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Pretth sure that JIF is already trademarked and copyrighted by the peanutbutter brand.

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- Zorque@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  That would just mean you couldn’t use the graphic format for pictures of peanut butter. It should be fine for everything else.
  
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TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Only if they claimed it would as Spanish language inspired and insisted it was pronounced hif

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- teft@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  More like heef if we were using spanish pronunciation.
  
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- SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  I prefer the German style
  
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  - actionjbone@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    GIF is way too short to be German.
    
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magic_lobster_party@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
They should’ve called it JPG to settle JPG vs JPEG

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- WindyRebel@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Well now I feel like an idiot because I thought they were actually two different file types with some stupid rule like how many pixels they could display. 😂
  
  I had to look it up and find out it changed because of operating systems and what they could handle for naming conventions.
  
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