Philip Rogers writes: I don't think SMIL can be implemented off the main thread efficiently. SMIL has more requirements than CSS animations (e.g., animating the class attribute) and this pretty much requires that it be done on the main thread. I'm aware of two independent implementations of SMIL and Javascript around today: Gecko, and Blink (plus Webkit, which is similar to Blink here). In neither of these is SMIL faster than Javascript. I have optimized Blink's SMIL code and can say it will not be faster than rAF anytime soon. It’s a shame we don’t still have ASV and old Opera around for comparison, since they had the best and most thorough implementations of SMIL. The others always seemed to this user/investigator, a bit primitive. I don’t know what was done under the hood though I’m Erik and Alex undoubtedly do. The methodologies reported at http://www.svgopen.org/2007/papers/BrowserPerformanceMeasures/index.html are still worthy of consideration and the two little testing apps built to test things like SMIL v JavaScript animation still run (at least in some browsers!) Both Opera and IE/ASV had noticeably smoother and faster implementations of SMIL up until I stopped testing maybe 2 years ago. As of that time Opera had finally caught up with and even surpassed ASV in many of the benchmarks! Of course the cognitive benefits of SMIL are not merely due to the elegance and ease of programming (which of course does not endear SMIL to many), there are some data to support its practicality as well;) It’s good to see some progress being made in FF and Chrome though (can’t comment about Apple since they don’t let us play at that table any more)! Cheers David
Received on Wednesday, 11 June 2014 20:54:26 UTC