What formats supporting animation are suitable for the web?

What formats supporting animation are suitable for the web and what are the pros and cons of each.

Answer

It depends on what type of animation you need.

• .gif images - Fully supported, but limited use with frames. .png files are supposed to have support for animation, but you don't see it in the wild very often, if at all.


• Flash, Silverlight, and other plugins - Flash has the most ubiquity, but all plugins need to be installed in the browsers and can't necessarily be counted on to be installed on a user's computer. May not work for mobile platforms.


• CSS3 - Limited transforms or animations, limited browser support.


• HTML5 video - The future, but limited browser support.


• JavaScript - Needs to be enabled, but should have near universal browser-support. Limited types of animation. See Raphael.js.



• Canvas tag - Modern browser support, but supports rich animations.