RE: When is the SVG 2.0 specification due to be finalized?

Jelle Mulder:

>Latest version of Chrome tells me this.
>
>SVG's SMIL animations (<animate>, <set>, etc.) are deprecated and will 
>be removed. Please use CSS animations or Web animations instead.
>
>Did I miss something or is it official?
>
>If so, it's a crying shame.

And on Monday, October 26, 2015 6:27 AM
Dr. Olaf Hoffmann :

>Well, looks like the WebKit/Blink developers say good bye to international
standards and W3C recommendations.
>To suggest to use an experimental feature of CSS, not finalised, not
applicable for content, only for decoration indeed shows, either they do not
understand, what they are doing, or they know exactly what to do to
obfuscate W3C efforts ...
[...]
>At least this is a quite clear statement against W3C recommendations -
obviously the mission of W3C failed.
[...]
>Looks like we need independent organisations to care about standards for
digital formats including reference implementations. 
>Because in this century at lot of cultural information depends on digital
formats, it is obviously irresponsible to rely on such companies and
organisations to care about standards of any kind.
--------

Some extraordinary people are working on the language of Web Animations [1],
and though SVG2.0 apparently points to its as yet unresolved phrasing (which
may or may not require SMIL compatability), in the meantime I see
abandonment of support for the existing animation standard that has been
implemented by many browsers, mobile and other viewers. I don't see how a
formal objection to SVG 2.0 is not in order, but would love to hear it since
the deliberate undermining of existing standards and content developed
according to those standards seems to work contrary to my understanding of
the W3C's objectives, as well. Perhaps reconstitution of web standards under
some other body would be appropriate. 

On side issues: Opera (version 9.5 or so) probably had the broadest
implementation of SVG to date (coming close to ASV in terms of raw support
for features and their myriad combinations) and was (as per my experiments)
about 15% stronger for animation than current versions of either FF or
Chrome (much of that stemming from interactions of animation with filters
and or text). That Chrome can deprecate something already working implies,
it would seem, that Blink is no longer open source, or at least that it is
no longer compatible with the premise of open source software. So open
sourcing Presto would be nice, since it was originally written (unlike as I
understand it FF and Webkit) with SVG-SMIL in mind, meaning that the code is
presumably far more efficient that the gunk that came to be Webkit. However,
I've gotten the sense, informally, that such is highly unlikely since Presto
is still tightly integrated with Opera's mobile market in Europe. 

Jelle also wrote:
> No doubt, Adobe will love this new development. 10 more years of Flash as
only the arcane can handle Web and CSS animations.

I've been arguing (half-seriously) that animated GIF is now the only true
open standard for animation. Its damn patent expired and now no one can
un-standardize it, since the patent language is clear and has even been
litigated against. Perhaps the proper paradigm for future development is:
first patent and then open source. Animated GIF has huge buy-in in the
social media environment, where HTML and SVG are largely invisible anyhow,
and one can export to it from Blender, Mathematica, Adobe products, R,
Processing and a dozen other environments, some of which make for fairly
clean animations; just a shame it's so crappy. SVG/SMIL was a whole lot
nicer.

Cheers
D
[1] https://w3c.github.io/web-animations/

Received on Monday, 26 October 2015 20:32:42 UTC