SVG animations without SMIL

Despite what some people may say, SVG geometric content is specified in SVG
 primarily by the path descriptions. If area colour or line thickness, say, is
part of the SVG content it will use SVG rendering attributes or CSS
properties in such a way that they cannot be changed by a change in user
stylesheet.

SVG animation when it is being used for industrial control, government
statistics, algorithmic animation etc  also is SVG content including the
timing of such animations.

While it is sensible to move the timing of simple styling transitions to
CSS,  allowing the user to turn them off, it makes less sense moving SVG
content to CSS.
Animating SVG content has been a core part of SVG from the early days in
the life of the SVG WG. It will be an enormous loss if it gets removed
especially when it is well supported in both Chrome and Firefox.

Having said that, we are in the middle of preparing a paper  entitled
Future of SVG's Declarative Animation (
http://www.bahfrah.org.uk/florence/future_svg_animations.htm) showing how
styling simple SVG animations might be achieved via CSS without moving the
path descriptions to CSS.

That paper includes a short 6 second animation which has 707 animate
elements that animate path descriptions.

The 6-minute animation that opened the WWW24 Conference in Florence this
year
runs smoothly in  Chrome and also in Firefox most of the time.  It has 4999
animate elements most of which are animating path descriptions.

It can be downloaded from
http://www.bahfrah.org.uk/florence/florence_zip.zip
or run directly from
http://www.bahfrah.org.uk/florence/playviewbox.xml

Significant size animations can be run smoothly in today's browsers.  Many
people use SVG animations for content. It is inappropriate to control the
timing of them from CSS even if it is possible. Please reconsider the plan
to drop animating SVG content from SVG 2.0.