RE: SVG animations without SMIL

From our industrial perspective, the types of animations we (animating contents on technical engineering drawings) would be interested in require the animation of not only SVG object locations (x,y,width,height, radius) but also the paths (d) and stroke-dasharray, to be able to animate flows in diagrams.  So from industry, the need is less for the graphic arts sort of animation (fonts wiggling etc) and more from a ‘builting a cartoon that plays smoothly, rather than a flip-book style of layers turning on/off’ approach.

Thomas
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Thomas Smailus, Ph.D.  P.E.
Boeing Information Technology

From: Philip Rogers [mailto:pdr@google.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 02, 2015 10:30
To: www-svg@w3.org
Subject: 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.