Why is default avatar a gif?

[Weebs]

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?

[Mike McGowan]

My best guess is that at one point they were trying to have full IE6
support and since (rightfully) given up on that.

[Paul Hazen]

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.

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From: Mike McGowan
Sent: 3/24/2012 6:18 PM
To: Tumblr API Discussion
Subject: Re: Why is default avatar a gif?

[Steven Pears]

I know this is an old question - but I thought I'd just mention that all you need to do with the default gif image is change the extension the .png and it's handled correctly. I've just had this issue with Silverlight because it can't handle gif images by default, but changing the extension has got it displaying nicely!

 

Steven