Re: SVG 2 FPWD published (animateColor)

(2012/08/30 22:46), Dr. Olaf Hoffmann wrote:
> Robert Longson:
>
>> <animate> tag works perfectly well to animate colours in SVG.
> The same applies for animateColor

My main concern with animateColor is that the element names in animation 
currently serve overlapping purposes: (a) differentiating fundamentally 
different types of animation (e.g. set vs animate), (b) differentiating 
between different target data types (e.g. animateColor vs animateTransform).

I understand the reasons <animateColor> was originally introduced, but 
in hindsight and given the expanded capabilities of <animate>, I think 
this design is not something we should perpetuate since in order to get 
a full set of features, you need element names corresponding to the 
Cartesian product of (a) and (b).

For example, I often want to use a <set>-style animation on a transform 
list but there is no <setTransform> so instead I have to fake it (using 
<animateTransform values="scale(2)" ... />, or actually, since some user 
agents don't support single-valued values lists, <animateTransform 
values="scale(2); scale(2)" ... />). I think it's better to simply make 
<animate> and <set> operate on transform lists and I'm really glad that 
is now proposed in CSS Transforms.[1]

That's my primary concern with animateColor. The other being that I 
think the existence of animateColor unnecessarily complicates the Web 
platform for authors.

By not implementing animateColor in Gecko (and at a time when neither 
WebKit not IE did either) the hope was to strongly discourage the use of 
this syntax so it needn't clutter the Web platform going forward.

It's not about effort since implementing animateColor in Gecko is 
probably only a couple of hours' work. As has been pointed out before, 
not implementing features is often much harder.[2]

Regarding SVG 2, personally, I've rarely encountered animateColor. It 
has never been supported in Gecko or IE so I don't imagine there is a 
lot of content on the public Web (test suites aside) that depends on it. 
However, if someone has evidence to the contrary I don't mind if, for 
example, animateColor appears as a footnote in SVG 2 and disappears 
altogether in SVG 3.

Best regards,

Brian

[1] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-transforms/#svg-animate-element
[2] 
http://robert.ocallahan.org/2010/06/not-implementing-features-is-hard_03.html

Received on Friday, 31 August 2012 00:16:38 UTC