My current theory is that the Tumblr god is a spiteful god who does not care to make such things for us easy to deal with for mere mortals.
In all seriousness though, most languages support some kind of mechanism to interpret file types on redirects, and if not most languages also support detecting image type / catching image load failures, so it shouldn't be TOO much of a problem.
What I do is store a "default" image of my own creation, and if the avatar image fails to load for any reason (network connection, or default image being a GIF) I simply load my default image. (which is a jpeg). ...although I guess you didn't really ask how to deal with it, just why it is...
Sent from my phone, pleasure excuse the brevity.
________________________________
From: Mike McGowan
Sent: 3/24/2012 6:18 PM
To: Tumblr API Discussion
Subject: Re: Why is default avatar a gif?
My best guess is that at one point they were trying to have full IE6
support and since (rightfully) given up on that.
On Mar 22, 8:45 am, Weebs <patriotss...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Can I ask why the default avatar is a gif file? It poses a bit of a problem
> because the url to retrieve the avatar is redirected, hence I have no idea
> what type of file I am retrieving until it's loaded and gif files are
> handled in a special way. But as a general question is there a reason why
> it's a gif file? why not png?
