RE: [web-animations] Request to publish another WD of Web Animations

Hi Brian,

I'm a bit confused (still). In looking through the document, it looks as though almost everything that looks like "traditional" animation (in terms of the 15 year old thing that people used to call a "W3C Standard" -- I finally understand W3C's use of the word "recommendation") has been replaced by JavaScript calls. I've been too busy developing content to try to digest the document properly. I realize developing content now is a most precarious thing, but I figure we might have a few years until everything breaks. 

Questions:
1. Realistically, how long might we have until everything breaks? (By everything, I only mean the SMIL animated stuff). I think previous versions of the Web Animations document still referenced declarative animation. The current one says:

" The animation features in SVG 1.1 are defined in terms of SMIL Animation [SMIL-ANIMATION]. It is intended that by defining SVG’s animation features in terms of the Web Animations model, the dependency between SVG and SMIL Animation can be removed."

I don't mind attaching the words "use only Firefox" to something that requires motion for its meaning, for a lot of academic work. But for the stuff that is more widely disseminated, it would be nice to know when SVG 1.1 will break.

2. Is the thought that all things that were previously declarative will now be done with either script or CSS? I think I'll need to see examples to understand what the putative future of animation is to look like. I recall that CSS has vowed never to do certain things that SVG does, and it shouldn't since it is wrong on 108 distinct levels. But requiring only scripted solutions would be most unfortunate as well!

3. In the past we could send messages back and forth between animation (SMIL) and JavaScript to a) trigger, for example, motion along a curve or interpolation between two curves from script and b) call script upon termination of some animation
(see for example http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/SVGOpen2010/Polygons/polygons10.svg which solves, in polynomial time, a long-standing problem thought to require N! steps. A small bug in Firefox, leaving chunks of pixels on the screen has been filed) .
Will that still be possible? 

4. One other question, I guess for the Blinkers among you: should we stop filing bugs in Chrome and Opera until SVG incorporates Web Animations or some other way to do animation? I have a few score of examples that are currently broken in Chrome. No sense reporting bugs if SVG is going away. How about Firefox? I understand that Firefox does not intend to withdraw support for SVG1.1, but if the SVG spec no longer mentions animation, then wouldn't fixing bugs associated with it become less of a priority?


Regards
David 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Birtles [mailto:bbirtles@mozilla.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 07, 2015 7:03 PM
To: public-fx@w3.org
Cc: www-style@w3.org; 'www-svg'
Subject: Re: [web-animations] Request to publish another WD of Web Animations

On 2015/07/01 15:59, Brian Birtles wrote:
> On 2015/06/18 16:24, Brian Birtles wrote:
>> Dear all,
>>
>> The editors of the Web Animations specification would like to publish 
>> another Working Draft based on the current Editor's Draft.[1] A 
>> (rather
>> long) list of changes is included at the end of this mail.
>>
>> We plan to publish on July 2 unless there are any objections.
>
> Unfortunately the publication has been held up and we're now aiming 
> for July 7.

The new working draft has been published:

   https://www.w3.org/TR/2015/WD-web-animations-1-20150707/

Received on Monday, 13 July 2015 20:59:42 UTC