A possible (technical) solution for being able to include GIF Animations

As I understand it now, the main reason we can't have animated gifs in roll20 is because of how the system renders everything. In simple, the engine renders everything as one large image, then your viewer only renders what you are currently viewing. Because of this the first frame of GIFs are only shown. My suggestion is to render the GIFs as their own layer and objects. I do not know much of how HTML5 works, but from what I do understand it should be possible to render the GIFs as individual objects on top of the the main maps image. I can foresee this not being added for some time though due to how complicated it might be.

Heh, Roll20 was originally implemented via html5 and lots of "layers" via DOM objects. It worked ok on Chrome but really no where else (due to poor HTML5/CSS3 support in every other browser) and performance really fell off a cliff as games got more complex. The move to canvas based rendering was a direct response to the performance and compatibility issues involved with HTML5. Maybe in another year or so when the rest of the browsers actually get decent html5/css3 support it could be considered again but until then it is just too restrictive.