RE: Agenda, 1 October 2015 SVG WG telcon

Yes, as someone who has taught web-stuff (and even gopher-stuff before that) to college students for decades, SMIL is wonderful! 

 

Beyond that, there is the relatively enormous loss of functionality that appears likely to happen if SVG WG agrees to eliminate it from the 15 year old standard. And then there is the diminishment of respect for W3C as a standards body. If standards are so fickle as to be gutted  every so often then what is their value?

 

Cheers

David

 

From: Bob Hopgood [mailto:frahopgood@gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, October 06, 2015 6:47 AM
To: www-svg@w3.org
Subject: Re: Agenda, 1 October 2015 SVG WG telcon

 

I agree with Jelle re the ease of teaching animated graphics via SVG's animate/set/animateTransform elements.

 

On a Masters Course at Oxford Brookes, the students really enjoyed the coursework  involving the production of a Postman Pat animated film. Each year his mode of transport changed  (van, boat, aeroplane etc). They got a good grasp of the basics of computer graphics that they found  much more rewarding due to it being animated.

 

CSS is much more difficult to teach. The cascading/inheritance/importance model is quite confusing. Frivolous CSS transitions would not be anywhere near as effective at motivating students.

 

The sentence "Dynamic document content can be achieved via declarative animation or by scripts modifying the SVG DOM" needs to be changed. The phrase 'dynamic document content' is confusing. Nothing in CSS involves 'content', it is just styling. The word 'dynamic' has so many 

meanings that it is meaning less (a person positive in attitude, a force that stimulates change, etc).

 

The only sensible way to produce declarative animated content with fine timing control is using SVG's animate/set/animateTransform elements. I would not try to generate this animation, for example:

http://www.content-animation.org.uk/iw3c2_logos/2015_florence/florence_opening.htm"

any other way.

 

Bob Hopgood