I'm wondering if there are plans to support displaying animated gifs in Wolfram Cloud.
Without animations, I can't publish this essay in notebook format.
Manipulate isn't the right fit for this because a high quality animation could take minutes or hours to render. For instance, animations in post above used "3DRenderingMethod" -> "BSPTree"
, which is too slow for interactive use.
One way to address this is to allow embedding animated gifs into notebooks, and then let the browser display them. There are other lossless animation formats, but they don't have universal support like gifs.