The creator of the first format used to broadcast online animations died of the CVIV-19 suites.
Le Monde
Steve Wilhite, inventor of the GIF image format, is dead at the age of 74 years of complications related to COVID-19, has announced his family. In 1987, while working for Compuserve at the time the main provider of American Internet access, he had developed the .gif, a format that allowed to broadcast compressed images without loss of quality, particularly adapted broadcast on the nascent Internet network.
In 1989, Mr. Wilhite’s team released a new version of this format, making it possible to create animations. This innovation, at a time when it was almost impossible to broadcast videos online, had made the GIF very popular. The name has passed into common language in the 1990s to designate short animations. Millions of animated gifs, diversions, parodies and small mythical clips, are always widely used online.
In 2013, Mr. Whilhite had brought its answer to a twenty-five year debate concerning the pronunciation of the format it has invented: “The dictionary of Oxford accepts The two pronunciations, “djif” and “Guif”, but they are mistaken, “he then explained to the New York Times. “It is pronounced” djif “.” His favorite gif was the “Dancing Baby”, Animation-Lighthouse of the 1990s, had he also told the New York Times.