While reading all the lengths he was considering going to to make the thing blink, I just assumed an animated .gif was not an option. Seems pretty darn obvious.
"Seems" being the key word there. Its the same reason that sooo many people get screwed in the stockmarket. They look in the past and in retrospect, the great upheavals seem to obvious that they think that they can predict them and before they know it, they are down 50%. Same with great ideas. The concept of the wheel may seem simple to us now but I wonder how much thought it took to come up with it for the first time.
I don't think he's saying, in hindsight, after reading the whole article, that an animated GIF was obvious.
He's saying that he thought of the animated GIF option before coming to the end of the article, but that it was so obvious to him that he assumed the fact that the author had neglected it meant that it wasn't a possibility for technical reasons.
