Using PERL and Javascript to control animated images

I was hoping javascript would offer more control over GIFs, but it doesn't look like it. It can, however, control a slideshow of images. So, I wrote a javascript control page and PERL script to search an HTML file for GIF links, make directories & convert each GIF into sets of PNG images, then replace the original GIF link with one that points to a page containing the javascript slideshow controls.

The PERLscript is located on shell, in /home/yirak/bin/publish.pl.

The webpage author can control whether or not to convert a given GIF and whether or not to resize it to 640x?.

The tag should be as follows:

<a HREF="..." ... [unpack={0|1}] [resize={0|1}]> ... </a>

where both unpack and resize are optional; the defaults are unpack=1 and resize=1.

!!! NOTE: The HREF tag must be all on one line. !!!

The script should be fairly easy to use:

Instructions

• Write your index.html page like you normally would, including GIFs.
• Denote GIFs you don't want processed with unpack
• Denote GIFs you don't want resized (typically this means downsized) to 640x? with resize
• Run publish.pl from the same directory as index.html. It will create a backup of your page, index.html.backup.
• Voila!

If you want to run it on a webpage other than index.html, pass the filename as an argument to publish.pl.

The javascript gets information about the image set from the URL: initial frame, final frame, directory, interval between frames (optional).

If you need to rerun the script

Assuming your file is index.html, the perlscript will copy this to index.html.backup and will modify index.html. Thus, if you want to add another GIF & rerun the script, you must

:~> mv index.html.backup index.html
:~> publish.pl