Yeah animated GIFs are pretty much the most universal since all web browsers are able to show them directly.

The main thing that is a pain with them is that they can only contain 256 colors, so they usually need to be color reduced from your original screen and you can get some speckly dot pattern stuff because of that.

They can also get to be kind of large if you try to have a very long one, say longer than 10 seconds or so. If you get much past that you're kind of getting more into video file territory. In Camtasia you can adjust the frame rate for how many frames the GIF will be showing per second and reducing that makes for more steppy kind of motion but reduces file size a lot.

- Michael