Re: SMIL is dead,.. long live the SMIL

On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 5:35 PM, Charles Lamont
<charles@gateho.gotadsl.co.uk> wrote:
>>> The result is that I am totally confused. Is SMIL dead or not? Will the
>>> SMIL animated SVG that I wrote, and which has featured in Wikipedia for
>>> the last 6 years continue to work (where it does now) or not?
>>> Is it intended that some time soon SMIL declarative animation (or
>>> something 'backward compatible') will work in Internet Explorer or not?
>>
>> SMIL won't work in IE for the foreseeable future; I don't particularly
>> expect them to change their position on this (but I could be
>> surprised).  It will continue to work, as much as it does, in the
>> other browsers; in particular, Chrome is dropping its native support
>> and switching to browser-JS to run it instead.  This shouldn't come
>> with much, if any, of a behavior change.
>
> Presumably, then, it would stop working in Chrome for someone who has
> disabled Javascript?

I have no idea.  You can test this by turning off JS and trying to use
the <marquee> element; it's already implemented via browser JS in
Chrome.

>> We (Chrome) aren't interested in any further changes or improvements
>> to SMIL, though.  Further improvements to animations should be done by
>> additions to Web Animations, and if we need declarative ways to access
>> such improvements, we'd prefer it be done via additions to CSS
>> Animations.
>
> I still don't understand what this actually means:
>
> http://www.w3.org/TR/web-animations/#relationship-to-other-specifications
>
> I don't know what you mean by "... if we need declarative ways ...".
>
> This page:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SVG_animation
>
> makes the problem with the WG's approach very clear. Looking at the
> examples, the SMIL example is clear and readable; the CSS example is
> less so, for reasons vehemently expressed by DD & JM earlier in this
> discussion; and the scripted example is even more verbose and cannot
> even be demonstrated: "No example as uploads with ECMAScript are
> barred". Scripting is not always possible. Declarative animation, where
> it can be used, is usually simpler to write, read and maintain.

Those examples are extremely terrible.  The CSS one repeats itself
twice, due to prefixes; the -moz one is definitely unnecessary, and
the -webkit one may or may not be (it works unprefixed on my machine,
but that might be due to a flag I have turned on).  Once you remove
those duplications, the example becomes similar in size to the SMIL
one (less lines, but longer; total text length is roughly comparable).
The scripting example is similarly terrible; it's being done with
plain JS, not the Web Animations API.  Written properly, the JS
example will be roughly the same size and complexity of the other two
examples.

~TJ

Received on Wednesday, 18 March 2015 04:17:22 UTC