Animation

A few of us had a meeting on Friday to talk about animation features.
Currently there are several animation-related standards or proposed
standards:
-- SMIL Animation (W3C)
-- SMIL 1/2 (W3C)
-- CSS transitions (Apple)
-- CSS animations (Apple)

I think we reached a tentative consensus:
1) "Animated UI effects" and "Movie-like animations" are somewhat
different sets of use cases.
2) CSS transitions seems like a good solution for "animated UI
effects", assuming a satisfactory answer to the question of what
happens when, during a transition from A to B, the CSS property is set
to a new value C. We should press on with implementation.
3) SMIL is overcomplex, very difficult to understand in general and
even the Animation subset contains some unnecessary features (e.g.,
'event', 'wallclock' and 'accessKey' animation timing in SVG
Animation).
4) CSS animations wouldn't let us animate SVG because a lot of the
important SVG properties are not controllable via CSS.
5) Voluminous animation data (e.g. for a lengthy movie) should be in
markup rather than separated out into a CSS sheet.
6) Additive animation as supported by SMIL, but not the CSS animations
proposal, would be useful.
7) Overall, including other factors in favour of SMIL Animation (other
browser implementations, existing standard, etc), it seems best to
press on with implementing SMIL Animation.
8) During that process we should identify SMIL Animation features
superfluous to the needs of the Web, and try to develop a cross-
browser consensus to exclude those features.

Rob