gif anim question

[skyrunner]

looking at the long banner i now have in the header John

there's some colored circles at the left end - text at the right end - white space in the middle

in that empty middle section i now want to put some gif animation

your advice please about the following

Ive considered that i could leave it as one long banner with a gif animation in the middle

alternatively i could break it up into three smaller sections, with the animation only in the middle section - as long as when i load the three sections - i get the illusion of a continuous white background running the length of the banner

there might be a third alternative -
you've mentioned in an earlier post there is a technique for overlaying text over a banner - perhaps there's a technique i can use to overlay and position a gif animation in that middle section of the banner ? since it'll be a white background over a white background, there'll be no probs. with background match and no need for transparency ?

what do you think John ?

http://www.skymondo.com

[john]

you've mentioned in an earlier post there is a technique for overlaying text over a banner

There is not a consistent behavior for animated GIFs used as the background of a cell via CSS (wow, was that a complex statement), so that technique would not be advisable here.

Ive considered that i could leave it as one long banner with a gif animation in the middle

I don't see why you wouldn't want to do it this way. I can't see any advantage to splitting it up. If the gif animation is done right, you won't see any significant difference in file size.

[skyrunner]

thanks for that John

the reason for splitting it up was exactly, as you picked up, because i thought the file size would be smaller, since there would be a much smaller box ( background ) around the animation

it surpises me still, that there wiill be no difference. in file size - still getting my head around that.

have you got anything in mind when you say -
if the gif animation is done right ?

the way i would do it is to make the present long banner, into the background - and then animate on the one layer thats left to me - the animation layer - fortunately the gif animation module in Xara, allows me to do this

http://www.skymondo.com

[john]

Gifs are small in the first place, and good graphics programs already know how to solve this problem. (That's all I meant by 'done right'.)

Just make your gif, add it to your blog, and don't sweat it. According to this service, your page already loads as a total of 608K including 470K of images. Another 10k or 20k gif is not going to affect page load times one bit.

[skyrunner]

got it ! will do .. !

gif animations are great being so small !

there overlooked little gems to some extent i think -
they dont have sound though - however even that, is an advantage, and a disadvantage

thanks for the comments John

http://www.skymondo.com