Archive

Happy new year! As promised I thought I’d share a few of the Web animation things I’m looking forward to in 2017. I’m terrible at predicting the future (I used to be a believer in BeOS and VRML) so this is mostly based on what is already in motion.

MozAnime is the informal name we use to cover all the work on animation-related features at Mozilla. We’re based in Tokyo, Tochigi, Taipei, Toronto, and… somewhere in France that probably, hopefully, starts with a ‘t’ as well.

I can’t wait to tell you all the things I’m looking forward to next year, but in this post I want to share some of the highlights from the MozAnime crew in 2016.

At Mozilla Japan, we’ve been doing a series of monthly events called “Gecko inside” where we discuss details of hacking on Gecko in the hope of helping each other learn and helping new contributors to get started.

Last weekend we held a special “write a patch” day where we gathered a group of long-time contributors to mentor first-time contributors through the process of setting up a build environment, writing a patch, and getting it reviewed and landed.

Fortunately Taipei’s shaved ice extravaganza Ice Monster has popped-up just around the corner from our office in Tokyo!

Now that I’ve sufficiently buried the lede, I’d like to introduce you to what our platform engineers have been up to in the land of the rising (and scorching) sun.

Since April we’ve been trying to focus our efforts around two themes: Input and Animation although we also work on other items like fonts and supporting partner projects.

Earlier this week, Blink announced their intention to deprecate SMIL. I thought they were going to replace their native implementation with a Javascript one so this was a surprise to me.

Prompted by this, the SVG WG decided it would be better to split the animation features in SVG2 out into a separate spec. (This was something I started doing a while ago, calling it Animation Elements, but I haven’t had time to follow up on it recently.)

Yesterday marks 10 days to the day since I posted my first patch to Bugzilla. It was a small patch to composite SVG images with their background (and not just have a white background).

Since then I’ve contributed to Firefox as a volunteer, an intern, a contractor, and, as of 3 years ago tomorrow, a Mozilla Japan employee.

It’s still a thrill and privilege to contribute to Firefox. I’m deeply humbled by the giants I work alongside who support me like I was one of their own. In the evening when I’m tired from the day I still often find myself bursting into a spontaneous prayer of thanks that I get to work on this stuff.

So here are 8 reflections from the last 10 years. It should have been 10 but I ran out of steam.

Just recently I had the chance to talk about authoring animations of CSS/SVG for better performance at The Graphical Web 2014. I thought I’d put up the slides here in case they’re useful to others.

Over the weekend I had the chance to speak about Web Animations at the HTML5 conference 2013 in Tokyo. I put a fair bit of work into the presentation so I thought I’d put up an English version of the slides (including videos of the demos) in case they’re useful to someone else looking for a gentle introduction to Web Animations.

Last time I introduced timing groups in Web Animations as a simple yet powerful tool for synchronising animations. Great as they are, they open up a few interesting questions. For example, what happens when you pause an animation that’s in a timing group?

Once you start animating anything more than simple fade and slide effects, pretty soon you start wanting to synchronize things. The penguins should start dancing together, the watermelon should explode the moment the blind-folded person hits it, the credits should roll after the movie finishes and so on.