Sharing the spinner with icon theme

[Marco Pesenti Gritti <mpeseng tin it>]

I'd like to know if it would be possible to share the spinner (throbber)
between nautilus and epiphany.
Using the gnome icon theme would seem like the right way to do it, with
the advantage to make it themable too.
Current implementation doesnt use a single animation though, but a set
of images.
Would make sense to change it to use an animated gif instead ?

Possible problems:

- Legal problems. The GIF patents are expired, so I think this should
not be an issue.
- The quality of gifs is limited to 256 colors. I've been able to
convert the default spinner without apparent lose of quality though.
http://mpgritti.oltrelinux.com/spinner.gif
So it seem to be possible to build nice spinners also with only 256
colors (and anyway, without using icon theme, they would not be themable
at all)
- The icon theme specification apparently doesnt support gif
"The image files must be one of the types: PNG, XPM, or SVG"
Is it intended ?

(This has been discussed briefly on
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=113161)


Marco