Re: SVG animations without SMIL

On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 11:32 AM, Philip Rogers <pdr@google.com> wrote:
> I had not considered how promoting 'd' would affect implementations that
> haven't supported SMIL. I wasn't able to find any spec other than SMIL which
> have path interpolation so we'd be asking implementations such as IE to
> implement SVG path interpolation for the first time. Because the old syntax
> is on the way out, this has convinced me that promoting 'd' is not a
> practical short-term solution.

The current path interpolation rules are absolutely trivial; it's just
a component-wise interpolation of every number in every segment, with
a rule for how to handle booleans (non-zero values are true).  This is
not the type of burden that should make us hesitate.

We must not let perfect be the enemy of the good here.  "Let's make a
new, better path syntax" is absolutely something we should do, but it
is *not* a short-term project.  Developing it, refining it, and
agreeing on it is going to take at least 6 months to a year.  In the
meantime, we still can't animate paths in WebAnim, which is silly.

Let's just promote the d attribute, come up with a property name for
it (not 'd'), and define the simple interpolation rules for it.  We
can fix path at our leisure then.

~TJ

Received on Thursday, 4 June 2015 18:51:39 UTC