SVG animations without SMIL

www-svg,

Animating SVG content without SMIL can be difficult and I'd like kick off a
discussion on how to improve it. This recently came up because IE does not
have plans to support SMIL and Blink is moving towards removing support as
well.

Two projects at Google switched from SMIL to CSS animations and an issue we
hit was that useful graphics attributes such as 'd' are not yet
presentation attributes. Only attributes promoted to presentation
attributes can be animated with CSS. Would it be possible to have even more
attributes become presentation attributes in SVG2? Making 'd' and
'transform' presentation attributes has been discussed before but seems to
have petered out. For folks not familiar with CSS animations, I created a
small demo showing how they work: http://philiprogers.com/smilandcss.html

A second set of issues is the feature gap between web animations / css
animations and SMIL. These are probably best addressed in www-syle but they
are worth pointing out; Brian outlined a number of these in
https://birtles.wordpress.com/2015/05/01/what-do-we-do-with-smil.