Re: Dropping angle-bracket syntax for animation

Hi David,

Thanks very much for your feedback here.

I just want to clarify a couple of things in defense of those who 
suggested dropping SMIL:

a) No one's proposing dropping declarative animation altogether. Rather, 
the option that many seemed to prefer was replacing SMIL with CSS Animation.

b) Everyone recognises that the folks who developed SMIL know their 
domain best. Everyone wants to build on that experience even if they 
don't use SMIL syntax per se.


The real concern is that currently we have two competing models for 
animation which is not a good state of affairs for the Web platform. 
Myself and others have been considering how to harmonise the two models 
but some implementors expressed concern about investing time in 
implementing SMIL when CSS Animations already appears to have wider 
adoption.

Regarding the last point about adoption however, we're mostly just 
guessing, I don't think anyone really has hard data on this. Also, it 
was recognised that there's a lot more HTML on the Web than SVG so it's 
not really a fair comparison.


I believe Dean Jackson is going to look into what is required to bring 
CSS Animations up to feature parity before any resolution is made about 
how we go forward.


I think it would also be useful to draw up a concrete proposal about how 
to merge the two models into one. It is something I would like to do but 
may not have the opportunity (although I made a start [1]).

Thanks again,

Brian


[1] 
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/WG/wiki/F2F/Seattle_2011/Agenda/Animations/Harmonisation

Received on Tuesday, 2 August 2011 23:55:18 UTC