Re: Less antiquated format for animations

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

So, to give some positive input to this discussion, if gif,
ani (or more esoteric formats like mng or apng) are not acceptable
because they are not already supported by gnome and kde, how about
making use of a mechanism already present in the icon theme spec, and
define a set of extra keys for .icon files to indicate that a set of icons is
meant to be used as an animation. The frames of the animation can then
be stored as individual icons (and you don't have to explain why you put
a 240x240 image in the 24x24 directory...). Going this route also allows
to specify some extra parameters to ensure that you at least have the
same feature set that gif animations had a long time ago, like per-frame
durations, and maybe disposal modes.

In practise it could look like this:

24x24/animations contains

gnome-spinner.icon
gnome-spinner.png
gnome-spinner1.png
gnome-spinner2.png
...

All frames are available as regular icons, the first frame under the same
name as the animation.

gnome-spinner.icon has entries like

X-animation-sequence =
gnome-spinner.png,gnome-spinner1.png,gnome-spinner2.png,...
X-animation-delay = 100,100,100,200,...
X-animation-loop = 5

I think a setup like this would do much less violence to the icon
theme specification
while maintaining the essential benefits of the all-frames-in-a-png
hack: graceful
degradation for animation-less environments, no new image formats required.

Matthias