Animating clips (tracks in SVG?)

I'm developing a new SVG viewer and player in Java. 
(http://svgsalamander.dev.java.net).  The viewer portion is working,
and I'm currently working on animation.  Since my original intention
was to produce an SVG viewer/player that was particularly useful for
video games,  I'm paying attention to the animation features.

Looking over the SVG specification, it seems to me there is no ability
to create clips of animation.  The only way I can think of to create
things such as walk cycles, bouncing ball cycles, buttons with shimmers
that slide across them or other complex repetative animation with SVG 
are kludges involving creating events to keep reseting the begining 
times of animate elements.

For example, is there an easy way in SVG to create a circle that is
initially red for 2s, then changes to yellow over 5s, then pauses for 2s,
then fades to green over 5s, then pauses 2s, then fades back to red? 
(Let's call this complete animation a track).  Can I then repeat the
track as a unit?  Can I stop and start this track as a unit?  Can I 
define this in the <defs> block and have a <use> tag create several 
instances of it in different parts of the screen?  With different time 
offsets?  Perhaps speeding up or slowing down?

If SVG doesn't support this notion of tracks, would it make sense for
me to create a special tag for my viewer to support this?

Mark McKay
--
http://www.kitfox.com

Received on Wednesday, 6 October 2004 03:07:58 UTC