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Graphic Interchange Format
Short for Graphics Interchange Format, another of the graphics formats supported by the Web. Unlike JPG, the GIF format is a lossless compression technique and it supports only 256 colors. GIF is better than JPG for images with only a few distinct colors, such as line drawings, black and white images and small text that is only a few pixels high. With an animation editor, GIF images can be put together for animated images. GIF also supports transparency, where the background color can be set to transparent in order to let the color on the underlying Web page to show through. The compression algorithm used in the GIF format is owned by Unisys, and companies that use the algorithm are supposed to license the use from Unisys.
