Brian Birtles’ Blog

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

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.