Hi Brian,

I'm a bit confused (still). In looking through the document, it looks as though 
almost everything that looks like "traditional" animation (in terms of the 15 
year old thing that people used to call a "W3C Standard" -- I finally 
understand W3C's use of the word "recommendation") has been replaced by 
JavaScript calls. I've been too busy developing content to try to digest the 
document properly. I realize developing content now is a most precarious thing, 
but I figure we might have a few years until everything breaks. 

Questions:
1. Realistically, how long might we have until everything breaks? (By 
everything, I only mean the SMIL animated stuff). I think previous versions of 
the Web Animations document still referenced declarative animation. The current 
one says:

" The animation features in SVG 1.1 are defined in terms of SMIL Animation 
[SMIL-ANIMATION]. It is intended that by defining SVG’s animation features in 
terms of the Web Animations model, the dependency between SVG and SMIL 
Animation can be removed."

I don't mind attaching the words "use only Firefox" to something that requires 
motion for its meaning, for a lot of academic work. But for the stuff that is 
more widely disseminated, it would be nice to know when SVG 1.1 will break.

2. Is the thought that all things that were previously declarative will now be 
done with either script or CSS? I think I'll need to see examples to understand 
what the putative future of animation is to look like. I recall that CSS has 
vowed never to do certain things that SVG does, and it shouldn't since it is 
wrong on 108 distinct levels. But requiring only scripted solutions would be 
most unfortunate as well!

3. In the past we could send messages back and forth between animation (SMIL) 
and JavaScript to a) trigger, for example, motion along a curve or 
interpolation between two curves from script and b) call script upon 
termination of some animation
(see for example 
http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/svg/SVGOpen2010/Polygons/polygons10.svg 
which solves, in polynomial time, a long-standing problem thought to require N! 
steps. A small bug in Firefox, leaving chunks of pixels on the screen has been 
filed) .
Will that still be possible? 

4. One other question, I guess for the Blinkers among you: should we stop 
filing bugs in Chrome and Opera until SVG incorporates Web Animations or some 
other way to do animation? I have a few score of examples that are currently 
broken in Chrome. No sense reporting bugs if SVG is going away. How about 
Firefox? I understand that Firefox does not intend to withdraw support for 
SVG1.1, but if the SVG spec no longer mentions animation, then wouldn't fixing 
bugs associated with it become less of a priority?


Regards
David 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Birtles [mailto:bbirt...@mozilla.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 07, 2015 7:03 PM
To: public-fx@w3.org
Cc: www-st...@w3.org; 'www-svg'
Subject: Re: [web-animations] Request to publish another WD of Web Animations

On 2015/07/01 15:59, Brian Birtles wrote:
> On 2015/06/18 16:24, Brian Birtles wrote:
>> Dear all,
>>
>> The editors of the Web Animations specification would like to publish 
>> another Working Draft based on the current Editor's Draft.[1] A 
>> (rather
>> long) list of changes is included at the end of this mail.
>>
>> We plan to publish on July 2 unless there are any objections.
>
> Unfortunately the publication has been held up and we're now aiming 
> for July 7.

The new working draft has been published:

   https://www.w3.org/TR/2015/WD-web-animations-1-20150707/




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