I don't see french as easy.
Me too. And the words are not a problem. When I was in France, I could walk to bakery and ask with simple words for 5 cakes (breads?) I wanted and buy them, it sounded awfully, but it was possible. I can roughly translate error messages of French software I use everyday. The problem in my case is inability to perform parsing of speech into words.
I find it quite curious that some actually like and want animated GIFs! With most web pages, the first thing I do after they load is hit Shift-Escape to stop everything from wiggling about. If I didn't have a browser plug-in for this, I'm sure I would go quickly insane! I absolutely _hate_ website wigglies, I find them staggeringly annoying! Now if only I had a way to stop those irritating slide show widgets that appear at the top of many websites... . (The only recourse I have discovered for those is to position the mouse pointer over the widget's forward or back button.)
I like it when it's not abused. In 99% of websites they are abused (as most of web technologies). e.g.
- Putting lots of animations on the same single view, generally multiple moving/changing things at once. This is a bad practice everywhere, not only in web pages.
- Using GIF for movies/clips. We have better ways to do this. We had better ways when GIF was the most popular format on the web, we had better ways when movies were played on TV connected to PC through special ISA board because VGA was too slow.
- Using flashing colors, typical for ads.
- Not using the transparency when it needs to be used.
and many other.
However, e.g. slowly fading bullet designating the most important point in page's summary, an interactive slideshow-like element of full-screen menu, actvated by mouse-on a still image, one item at once, or animation of machine's operation in a semi-technical drawing is not abusing at all and has practical value.