CompuServe introduced GIF on 15 June 1987 to provide a color image format for their file downloading areas. This replaced their earlier run-length encodingformat, which was black and white only. GIF became popular because

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As a noun, the word GIF is found in the newer editions of many dictionaries. In 2012, the American wing of the Oxford University Pressrecognized

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GIFs are suitable for sharp-edged line art with a limited number of colors, such as logos. This takes advantage of the format's lossless compression, which favors flat areas of uniform color with well defined edges. They can also be used to store low-color

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Conceptually, a GIF file describes a fixed-sized graphical area (the "logical screen") populated with zero or more "images". Many GIF files have a single image that fills the entire logical screen. Others divide the logical screen into separate sub-images. The images may

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Microsoft Paintsaves a small black-and-white image as the following GIF file. Paint does not make optimal use of GIF; due to the unnecessarily large color table (storing a full 256 colors instead of the used 2) and symbol width, this GIF file is not an efficient representation of

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The GIF Specification allows each image within the logical screen of a GIF file to specify that it is interlaced; i.e., that the order of the raster lines in its data block is not sequential. This allows

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GIF is palette-based: the colors used in an image (a frame) in the file have their RGB values defined in a palette tablethat can hold up to 256 entries, and

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