Re: SVG animations without SMIL

“It is used in many contexts beyond the eyes of web spiders.”

That is a very good point from David Dailey - I for one have been using SVG+SMIL animation in industrial systems since when there was only the Adobe SVG viewer. These (by now) hundreds of sites are all on private networks so won’t appear in any web usage statistics.

Now that we finally have all but Microsoft supporting SVG animation to some extent the W3C seems intent on supporting browser developers who can’t be bothered to finish off their work and go back to a situation where only one or two browser options are available to users who want to view SVG animation.

I have no problem with adding STYLE animations to CSS but it is not a replacement for CONTENT animation in SMIL. If we end up with two standards SVG 1.1 for content animation and SVG 2 for style animation then that would be messy but at least then we would again see what browsers will support what. If the browsers don’t support the facilities the users want then those browsers will not be used.

As Chris Lilley explained the path description does all that it was designed to do well, it may be a little difficult for a novice to read (but no more so than all the Javascript code on the web without any formatting!) but it is fairly easy to parse by a tool and as such serves well as a low level graphics specification. There are simple additions to the animation of paths that could be added (as suggested by Bob & David Duce) without breaking what is already there - If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

I can’t really understand why browser vendors would rather parse CSS than SVG, CSS isn’t even XML! - is XML no longer fashionable? ;-)
I am adding SMIL animation facilities to www.svg-editor.org and only wish the browsers were more complete / consistent but I have no intention of providing any tools for CSS editing. CSS can just be edited as text and it is likely that it will take even longer for any useful animation tools to become available for creating anymore than cosmetic animations in CSS.  

Paul