Re: [css3] Animation Element Proposal (was: Proposal)

On Dec 8, 2006, at 2:15 AM, David Woolley wrote:

>
>> SVG does do alot of what flash does. But to suggest someone open up
>> Inkscape, and embed a bunch of raster frames in it, then manually
>> write up some SMIL to animated them on hover is overboard.
>
> I was suggesting that if your primary aim is animation, you should
> use what has become an animation language, for the *whole* document.
> If your primary aim is a document, you should accept that some things
> are inappropriate for documents.  (A lot of commercial HTML is  
> striving
> to be animation rather than document.)

This attitude is slightly unrealistic. Most commercial sites would  
end up using Flash entirely, since SVG is currently inadequate. I  
don't believe that "animation" and "document" are enough to describe  
all the real-world uses of HTML. Nor is the distinction between  
document and animation so clearcut in many cases. Hell, for that  
matter, even "document" isn't quite as static as might be implied by  
the original use of that word... CSS itself allows for documents to  
be presented in many different media. That they might contain sound  
or video or animation as parts of them isn't disputed by anyone here,  
is it? And I've not even mentioned webapps, which like them or not  
are here to stay.

>
> Trying to make a document language behave like an animation one tends
> to produce a result that is simply unstable and browser dependent,
> as well as being bloated.

Not trying to make the "document language" behave like an animation.  
Rather what I proposed would make it possible for CSS to modify how  
an animated GIF (since somehow MNG seems even less likely than a new  
CSS property) is presented to the user. For that matter, I was even  
wondering if there should be a value that allowed you to specify  
which frame to display when printing that page, rather than the  
default behavior of printing the first frame. How could such a  
printed document be an "animation" ?

> P.S. The quoting style in the plain text version of your email is much
> easier to understand than the HTML one, could I suggest that you turn
> off the HTML.  You will find that all the primary developers (I'm not
> one) only send plain text.  It would also considerably reduce the mail
> folder footprint (currently 14KB).

My apologies, thought I had turned that off.


John Oyler
john@discrevolt.com

Received on Friday, 8 December 2006 15:25:39 UTC