Decoding a GIF question

Question

For a personal project I'm creating a static gif decoder. Everything works well so far, except I'm having trouble understanding one concept from the specification:

This block is REQUIRED for an image. Exactly one Image Descriptor must be present per image in the Data Stream. An unlimited number of images may be present per Data Stream. (Spec)

Unlimited images per data stream? There can be more than 1? I'm assuming they don't mean an animated GIF because in the same specification they state, that they don't recommend gif's be used for animation.

I've read a lot of other sites documenting the gif format and they all state something similar. Heres another link:

There might be an unlimited number of images present in a GIF.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

There can be more than one image present in a GIF file. Yes, GIF files can perform crude animation, but it's usually not pretty.