Re: SVG animations without SMIL

Tab,

I agree with your meta-point about not letting the perfect be the enemy of
the good, but SMIL has shown me that major vendor buy-in is a hard
requirement. I was assuming, maybe pessimistically, that the IE team would
not support implementing a new interpolation scheme for the old path syntax
any sooner than a new spec could be written. Would someone from Microsoft
be willing to comment?

With major vendor buy-in, I do support this.

On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 11:50 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
>