GIF represents a particular set of forced compromises: no audio, no controls, reasonably short, right-click-save-as available. The inefficiency of the file format also means people keep them dimensionally small.<p>HTML5 video doesn&#x27;t have those constraints, and there isn&#x27;t a separate type of &quot;thing&quot; which is an unobtrusive video. This isn&#x27;t about the codec, but guaranteeing a way of presentation. Maybe if videos could be loaded into &lt;IMG&gt; tags with those constraints?<p>GIF also behaves a lot better than video when you have lots of them on a page.