On Wed, 7 Jul 2004, Fustanella wrote:

Except it wouldn't, because then you run into licensing and patent
issues...Which is why most people are switching away from GIFs to JPEGs
and PNGs...Apart from anything else, PDFs tend to scale and print a lot

There's no such issue with GIF any longer. The LZW patent (one of the
compression technologies found in GIF) expired within the last year or so.

Actually, as was reported today on Slashdot
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/06/1717243, GIFs are still
encumbered by patents for at least two years. Since IBM is claiming the
violation of this patent in a lawsuit right now, it's hard to argue that
you are home-free to use GIFs without licensing the patent from IBM.

There's plenty of discussion about the patent and technical issues
at the address above.
--
Michael Hoffman