Re: sometimes I take SVG for granted

From Chris, Jon and the rest of the folks who worked on the original SVG
spec, thanks for the thanks! Regarding the convenient animation syntax
(that was implemented in dozens of user agents, and then MS deciding 10
years after the spec was out that they didn't want to implement it, grrr),
that came mostly from the SMIL Animation guys (Aaron/Intel, Patrick/MS,
Chris/W3C and me/Adobe at the time). Maybe the animation syntax in SMIL was
informed by the PGML submission (which was mostly me) and maybe by HTML
+SMIL, but that's so long ago, I can't remember how things happened
exactly.

It is indeed a royal pain that IE doesn't support SMIL in SVG. I ran into a
similar time-wasting effort because of this recently. For me, I wanted to
animate something that needed to run on desktop browsers and mobile
browsers. Older Mac Safari doesn't support CSS animations on SVG content.
It would have been easy to switch to SMIL for the SVG animations, but,
doh!, IE doesn't support that. To make things work across all browsers, I
ended up having two code paths, one which used CSS animations on SVG
content, and then for older mobile Safari, I used the SVG-to-canvas trick
to rasterize the SVG, and then temporarily hid the SVG, animated the
raster/canvas with CSS, and then restored the SVG when the animation was
done.

Jon





From:	"David Dailey" <[email protected]>
To:	<[email protected]>
Date:	02/18/2014 03:19 PM
Subject:	[svg-developers] sometimes I take SVG for granted
Sent by:	[email protected]





When I write code like d=”M 100, 100 C 300, 100 100,300 300,300” I usually
don’t remember how hard it was to do things like that in the good old days.

Today I really wanted something to work across browsers – it took me 15
minutes to cobble something together using SMIL animation that worked in
all browsers but Internet Explorer. I spent the rest of the afternoon
getting it to work in IE. Getting the timing loops synchronized
(synchronizing integer and floating point loops) was a royal pain. It was
not instructive; I am not a better person for the effort (I have done the
same bloody thing scores of times before).  And I realized that without
being able to say
<animate attributeName="opacity" values="0;1;1;0" dur="4s"
repeatCount="indefinite" />!
Or
<animate attributeName="opacity" values="0;1;1;0" keyTimes=”0;.1;.9;1”
dur="4s" repeatCount="indefinite" />

---
I’m going to have to struggle for another hour or two to get the fadein and
fadeout correct.

It just reminded me of how nice the SVG philosophy of markup is. Thank-you
Chris Lilley and Jon Ferraiolo and the others for the early work on behalf
of authors and artists!

Cheers
David









[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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