Animated smileys - not for this board and I’m not trying to get them on this board. I know they are juvenile and they suck and they have no place in the universe.
That said, on a different message board, there’s a smiley that has the smiley face jumping up and down. You can insert this into a post by typing :jump:
If you type in :jump::jump: you get two of them side by side in exact synchronization. Is there any way to delay the second one so the are out of synch?
Is there a way to put 10 in a row and delay each one slightly so you get a wave effect?
I don’t know, but you could create your own animated GIF from the original, and post it into the message (assuming you have a file host, and the board allows images). You could time their jumping, or even choreograph them to Neil Diamond, if you wished.
What you’re seeing is the same image repeated, not a second image, so they will always be in sync. The only way to do it is to create a second image of the same animation, but the start point moved, but even that is no guarantee because the timing is based on when it loads, and not on what other image it is next to.
How about creating a second copy of the same file, with the same start frame, but forcing a delay before it loads (I tried various ways of doing this though - none of them worked).
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it happen accidentally before - with multiple copies of the same back-end image getting out of sync - but that would have been in IE4 or something.
The images in question are animated gifs - with a number of frames and some cycle frequency. The browser could handle multiple instances of the same image as a single repeated image, in which case all the images will be synchronised, or it could handle them independently, in which case they could be starting out of sync. However, given that the image instances will be drawn out of a single cached initial download, it would have to be a really slow PC to render the multiple copies with any significant or visible delay.
Inserting multiple images (all starting at different points) would probably not work either. You (as the writer of the source HTML) have no control of the download/rendering order at the browser end. Your independent animations will start at different times and the sequencing could vary from refresh to refresh (and browser to browser.
To get the effect you desire, you need to create a single image that contains your entire animation - a whole line of bouncing emoticons all animated into one image. Then link that image into your post.
They will be drawn from a single cached file (or at least that seems the only sane way to do it), but depending on how the rendering engine works, there might not be any reason for them to stay in sync - animated GIF images are just a file containing a stack of frames, with a little bit of data dictating how they should be displayed - if the rendering engine treats each image on the page as a distinct object, each with its own connection to the file, then I think they could either start out of phase and stay that way, or drift in and out as each one gets more or less attention from the processor.
-That’s 13 differently-named individual copies of the same animation, interspersed by 12 differently-named individual copies of the same 23kb blank white image, sized to zero pixels. On my browser, it doesn’t load in strict sequence though.