solid colors

Hi all,

 

One of the nice things about CSS is that one can group objects together in a
semantic hierarchy using <g> and, then, orthogonally associate different
members of items across <g>-boundaries using different classes. So, for
example, the elements of an arm might consist of a watch, a sleeve, and a
hand, (all grouped together for purposes of spatial/semantic animation)
while the skin can be colored by the same gradient that is also applied to a
foot (living in a different group). Having orthogonal ways of inheriting
properties is a good thing (though not quite as strong, perhaps,  as what
one might hope connectors to be able to provide, in which semantic, and not
merely stylistic links between things could be established independent of
position in a DOM tree).

 

CSS animation doesn't work very well across browsers yet (particularly when
the SVG is viewed in <img> tags on social media) so rather than using CSS
animation to animate color transitions, I thought it might be nice to
provide a CSS referent to a paint-server that is just a <color> (animated by
SMIL) rather than a gradient.  Is there a way of doing that? It seems like
something that has probably been around since early SVG 1.1 and yet I never
had occasion to look. I see that such a thing (solid color) is under
consideration in

https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG2/pservers.html. But that is a lot more
sophisticated (allowing a fill to be a video for example) than what I'm
wondering about.

 

Regards, David

 

Footnote:

Most of the experiments I have done with using CSS instead of SVG to do my
animation fail in one way or another. About 1/5 of the things one would
expect to be able to do (based on experimentation with SVG for a goodly long
while) fail in IE/Edge, Safari, Chrome and Firefox. Another half fail in at
least one of Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Another large number fails in
Firefox when the SVG is viewed in the context of HTML image. I understand
that this CSS business is only a suggestion, but it took a decade until
"Real SVG animation" started to work consistently across browsers (much of
that consistency is now disintegrating), and having another decade to watch
as browsers work out the bugs in CSS (which isn't intended to be as powerful
anyhow) will be a continuing source of frustration and another good reason
for mathematicians and artists to continue to use animated GIF as their
imagery web-standard of choice. Dang! It really isn't as good as SVG as most
of you probably know, but at least it works and that is why my decade plus
of proselytizing for SVG has fallen on many deaf ears in those communities.
I still use SVG, though, for experiments in math, tessellation, datavis, and
even art - it's just that enthusiasm gradually gives way to frustration.
Sorry for complaining; it seems like something that might not be widely
known, since WG test cases are usually highly simplified - it's when one
combines CSS animation with things like <pattern> or <gradientTransform>
that things seem most likely to fall apart.