I never considered how LZW doesn't do RLE! LZW was probably chosen over Deflate ... | Hacker News

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Scaevolus on May 11, 2013 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Mystery of the Spotty Animated GIF

I never considered how LZW doesn't do RLE!

LZW was probably chosen over Deflate for simplicity reasons. Maybe webP's complexity has been hurting its adoption?

How does giflossy work? I don't see an explanation on that page.

pornel on May 12, 2013 [–]

lossy is simple — in the "pick the longest matching string from the dictionary" the match is allowed to be imperfect.

GIF lives because it's expected to work everywhere. WebP so far isn't even a first-class citizen in Google's world :(

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