Re: new feature request

As an objective measurement of my statement about SVG Animation against CSS
Animation, take a look at that simple Google Trend:

   -
   http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=SVG%20Animation%2C%20CSS%20Animation

Even if for 2 years SVG Animation seams to have more traction, CSS
Animation clearly takes over.

2015-03-16 11:40 GMT+01:00 Jeremie Patonnier <jeremie.patonnier@gmail.com>:

> 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>
>



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