Re: new feature request

Hi :)

2015-03-14 20:51 GMT+01:00 <ddailey@zoominternet.net>:

> Just how and why are people dropping SMIL? Where does the formal objection
> get lodged?
>

The only formal objection I'm aware of is Microsoft refusing to spend time
implementing SMIL in IE (unfortunately, I'm unable to find the record of
that). Because it is not implemented in IE and to say the least poorly
implemented in other browsers, web developers tend to avoid using it in
favor of CSS animation. But yes, that is not a reason to drop SVG/SMIL it's
just a trend in the web design world.


> I cannot think of anything more dramatically incorrect to do.
>

Well, I'm not sure about that. SVG/SMIL beyond the lack of support into
browsers as many drawbacks that makes it less appealing to web developers
than CSS animation:

   1. SVG/SMIL only provide a small subset of the full SMIL specification,
   which is not available at all in any modern web browser (Microsoft drop its
   support in IE8 as no one were using it). And because some of the best
   features of SMIL (like containers) is not available into SVG/SMIL, it does
   not really make it as useful as it could be. It's also worth noticing that
   any work on SMIL as official stopped at W3C since 2012.
   2. CSS Animation provide a more compact and easy to use model for web
   developer. They definitely like it. Simple use case like transition are
   easier to express wit CSS rather than with SMIL. For more complex
   animation, CSS Animation provide a more straight forward model with all the
   information about an animation centralise in one place. SVG/SMIL in the
   other hand require to spread the animation information all over the
   document making maintenance of animations way more harder than with CSS.
   It's true that CSS Animation provide less feature than SMIL (no time
   synchronisation, no events synchronisation, etc.) But CSS is so much easy
   to use for basic use case than web developer prefer to invest into
   JavaScript to handle those extra features rather than spending time
   learning a whole new language.
   3. As it exist no SVG/SMIL authoring tools, the intrinsic complexity of
   that API make web developers reluctant to create and maintain animation by
   hand with that API (to say the least, XML expressivity is to complex and
   many web developers prefer CSS because of that) .
   4. SVG/SMIL does not have any advocate that evangelize that technology.
   So most of the times, Web developer are not even aware such technology
   exist. But if they get aware, they can enjoy playing with it, and then
   immediately go back to CSS Animation for all the reason above.

So with all that, it explain why browser vendors are not eager to invest
into SVG/SMIL. For them it clearly appear as a dead end (mostly because XML
is a dead end in the browser world), which means it's not a business
priority.


> Clearly some views of the future of SVG are inconsistent with others.
>

I would love to know more about that :)

>From my web developer point of view, the future of SVG Animation is within
the new Web Animation standard which, if necessary, will allow to easily
polyfill the whole SVG/SMIL API and more (with full performance
optimization). Because of that, I think it makes sens to not spend some
time on improving SVG/SMIL and possibly deprecate it in future version of
SVG (at list make it an aside module like SVG Fonts for those who could
care).

Best,
-- 
Jeremie
.............................
Web : http://jeremie.patonnier.net
Twitter : @JeremiePat <http://twitter.com/JeremiePat>