Archive

Wow, what a heading! Some would call it lack of imagination, I like to think of it as artistic restraint — it’s just too easy to make puns with “SMILe”!

Progress on SMIL continues, albeit in slow motion. Just a really quick note for those one or two people who want to know what’s going on:

Today is the Queen’s birthday public holiday in Australia. In Sydney the weather is freezing and the surf is huge. All this means I’ve finally got my SMIL work to compile against the trunk again. Now to get it working again!

I’ve published the report I wrote for regarding my project implementing SMIL Animation in Mozilla. At 147 pages and ~700kb it’s fairly detailed but I hope it will be of interest to some. Thanks to all who helped. Here it is:

• https://birtles.blog/smil/report/report.pdf

G’day! I’ve produced a new patch to provide SMIL Animation for SVG. Since last time I’ve added:

• keySplines
• keyTimes
• accumulate
• restart
• min, max
• ElementTimeControl DOM interface

Here’s an updated patch with my latest changes including:

• Optimised performance—a lot of unnecessary rendering has been filtered out and the profiling I was able to perform suggests this has made a significant difference, especially when the animation is frozen.
• Animation now pauses and resets when the page is cached in the bfcache.
• Better thread safety.

Aided by flat surf but hampered by perfect weather I’ve spent most of the last week tidying up my code and updating the documentation on the wiki. The latest patch is hopefully much better, or at least not quite as hideous as it was in some parts.

Additive animation appears to be working. The test case I mentioned in the last post works even the nasty tree re-ordering cases. I’ve also extended the additive test case a little to test a bit more of the dynamic behaviour.

I’ve done most of the work required for additive animation. The remaining part is to correctly order animations in the animation sandwich after changes to the document structure.

I’ve begun work on implementing compositing. This will take some time. Also I’m no longer sure I’ll be able to deliver syncbase timing this year as instead I may need to focus on integration issues, performance, documentation, thread-safety and so on. Hopefully all this will mean it has a better chance of getting checked in sooner though.

I’ve added a basic implementation of repeating. This doesn’t include accumulating or repeat-based timing but this test and a whole lot of other tests seem to work. Also, I’ve added a couple more tests.