Warning for those with limited data allowances: the page has almost 15MB of animated GIFs. Far from the largest I’ve seen (we’ve had submissions with over 200MB of GIFs, which is beyond the pale), but decidedly bigger than I consider acceptable.
Could people please just stop using GIFs for this. It’s a bad format that has no place here. Or anywhere, frankly. Use a real video format, because they produce higher quality results in less space with less client-side resource usage, and handle loading better (generally granting users more control, like blocking autoload/autoplay). And yes, GitHub supports videos, so you can’t even claim GIF as a pragmatic option any more. (I maintain that such animated GIFs were inappropriate even before that was the case, but now we don’t even have to quibble over that point.)
But although I am complaining about GIFs, I do want to praise Aria for putting those things in a separate repository so that they’re not bloating the main code repository with big stuff that needs updating every so often anyway.
(Author here) Agree with you as I have to deal with limited data every now and then.
I was weighing whether to go with videos or GIFs a few days ago. Sadly, video in markdown is not supported everywhere (eg. in npmjs.com) so some users wouldn't see them. And the readme wouldn't make much sense without the videos as this project is about motion design, so not much to explain in text.
So I opted for GIFs and spent a couple of hours cutting/speeding up videos to get the file sizes down.
I don't think the use case would be popular enough for that to be incorporated into desktop browsers. Even on mobile, browsers rarely support setting a maximum file size for images. Enabling such a setting would break many of not most media oriented websites, and browser developers would probably get more complaints than thank yous for adding the feature because people want to save data but watch YouTube at the same time. Of course, developers have the ability to fix this on their websites, but when they (ab)use Github as a welcome page they often don't have enough control to do so effectively.
The best solution I can think of is either using addons or maybe a data saving proxy to help out. I doubt either will work on a work-issued laptop, though. Regardless, I'd personally assume that with a laptop I don't control, I also don't have any control over how much data it's using. I can't imagine having to browse the web with a browser I can't even install Ublock Origin onto.
Could people please just stop using GIFs for this. It’s a bad format that has no place here. Or anywhere, frankly. Use a real video format, because they produce higher quality results in less space with less client-side resource usage, and handle loading better (generally granting users more control, like blocking autoload/autoplay). And yes, GitHub supports videos, so you can’t even claim GIF as a pragmatic option any more. (I maintain that such animated GIFs were inappropriate even before that was the case, but now we don’t even have to quibble over that point.)
But although I am complaining about GIFs, I do want to praise Aria for putting those things in a separate repository so that they’re not bloating the main code repository with big stuff that needs updating every so often anyway.