That just the thing, though; video file formats do not intrinsically have any of those limitations, which is exactly why he wrote this article: it's a false dichotomy.

Files are just files, and video ones are typically smaller.

Imagine, if you will, a GouTube where animated GIFs were rigorously checked against existing copyrighted material, removed by DMCA requests, hosted around the world. How would it be mechanically different than Youtube, except for changes surrounding the Flash player?

Thusly, imagine Tumblr hosting WebM/H264 files instead of (or in addition to) GIFs. Mechanically identical.

On a GIF, you can right click and "save as". So a first step would be to have all browser makers allow this for video files too.

When using the <video> element, you can do exactly that. So we'd probably be in good shape. :)

(At least in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Try it out: http://www.w3.org/2010/05/video/mediaevents.html)

You can right click any html5 video and choose Save video as...

Still, you can't do this

http://www.cnet.com/how-to/an-imessage-prank-every-iphone-ow...

There are so many exceptions when saving a video, like you got only a chunk of a video because video files are segmented in m3u list, or stupid auto-throttling algorithms, or dumb-ass resolution auto-switching.