A BRIEF GUIDE TO PRODUCING ANIMATED GIFS
To Enhance Your HTML Files

Animated gifs help to bring a little life to HTML pages, but care should be exercised to ensure the the file size is not so great that it interferes with the other functions of the page.
A useful piece of shareware to build the gifs is Gif Construction Set Win 31 or Gif Construction Set Win95 or NT from Alchemy Mindworks. Another is Splash Animator which is even better in some respects.

The most time consuming part of producing an animated gif is the initial preparation of the individual pictures which are used in building the final animated gif file. I use CorelDraw6, although Corel 3, 4 or 5 would be just as good. I only use Corel because it is the drawing package I am familiar with. You will probably use your own favourite drawing programme.

The Clown.gif (2,891 bytes) above is just two gif files built together, one being a mirror image of the other. Normal gif files consist of two parts, a header and the image. However gif type 89a allows for control blocks, plain text blocks, comment blocks, application blocks, loop blocks and block name blocks.
It is best to house each image in a frame, and include the frame within each gif file. This ensures that the image does not jump about because all the action is contained within this frame.
The frame can be for example a rectangle filled with colour (see the clown.gif above), a bitmapped image (see bomb.gif below) or a transparent colour block.

In Gif Construction Set open up one of their example files and notice how the file is constructed. Delete each image line in the file and leave just one control for each of your gifs (in our example we need four controls). If you need more controls they can be added (or deleted) with the insert button.
Using the insert button, choose image and place the images in order and with a control block between each one. Our file when we have got this far would read from the top downwards

Click on view to preview the animation. It may be necessary to adjust the timing between the individual gifs, if so highlight the control block preceding the image block and click on edit. There the time can be set from zero upwards in 100ths of a second.

You should remember that there are several browsers which do not support these animated gifs. In such cases it is only the first frame which is displayed. So make sure the first frame is a nice picture or it may spoil your page. Transparent backgrounds can be utilised in the animations (see "Pet dog" below). I would suggest that you become proficient with normal gifs first.