SMIL

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.)

Firefox 4 is going four dimensional! Time dimensional! (Ok, for those who know physics, just pretend 🙂)

There’s CSS transitions for all sorts of animated eye-candy, major JS speed-ups to give scripted animations a boost and mozRequestAnimationFrame to get keep them smooth and in sync, and a whole host of other graphics and video improvements. Oh, and SMIL in SVG!

Our SMIL implementation passed another little milestone yesterday when we landed syncbase timing. We’ve still got a long way to go but this was always going to be the hardest feature for the timing model.

One last post as I race out the door. It appears my attempt to quash the enthusiasm surrounding SMIL doesn’t seem to have worked. It seems like some people are genuinely interested in SMIL and not just for Acid3!

Well, SMIL has finally landed on mozilla-central! It’s been a long road since I first started out on this project nearly 5 years ago but we’ve finally reached the first milestone! Thank you very much to many who have helped or even just offered encouraging comments but thank you particularly to Daniel Holbert, Robert O’Callahan, Chris Double, and Tim Rowley for their massive contributions. It’s been a team job all the way.

Yay, back to SMIL! This is just a brief update to let you know about the state of SMIL in Mozilla!

Here’s the low-context summary:

You’ve probably worked it out, but I’m no longer working on SMIL at the moment. tor has very kindly helped out and has been doing some work on this but it will not make it for Firefox 3.

From now on, if you want to track the progress of SMIL in Mozilla I recommend:

• #216462 Implement SVG (SMIL) Animation
• tor’s weblog

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