Inkscape Forum Inkscape > state of SMIL? + SVG animation workaround suggestion

I have been trying to learn more about SMIL recently. The concept sounds
great but I am very concerned about the progress of this technology.
Some of the SMIL links on the W3C site are dead and many of them are
from the late 90'S. Is SMIL just about dead?

On a more positive note, I had an idea that I hope will be helpful.

Regardless of what technology we use to generate an animated SVG, the
animation is unlikely to be available to the masses with IE sucking as
it does. I really am not qualified to offer tips to anyone here but on
the off chance that no one has thought of it, perhaps we could generate
an SVG animation locally, use a screencasting application and then save
it as  whatever-common-video-format.

With a browser identification we could then load the animated SVG to the
browser that supports it and the whatever-common-video-format to the 
others.

-Patrick

Patrick wrote:
> I have been trying to learn more about SMIL recently. The concept sounds 
> great but I am very concerned about the progress of this technology. 
> Some of the SMIL links on the W3C site are dead and many of them are 
> from the late 90'S. Is SMIL just about dead?
>
> On a more positive note, I had an idea that I hope will be helpful.
>
> Regardless of what technology we use to generate an animated SVG, the 
> animation is unlikely to be available to the masses with IE sucking as 
> it does.
I don't think this is actually the case.  It appears that Wikimedia
Commons people are focusing community interest on Inkscape and SVG a bit
more.  If SVG animations become a commonplace on Wikipedia, etc, it
would prompt people to 1) use a plugin for circumventing IE silliness,
and 2) demand native support in IE.  Yes, it will take a while, but just
giving up on an open format that has such potential is probably not an
ideal solution.  Nothing good happens overnight :)  There's been a bit
of talk about it on the dev list, and it seems that we may actually have
something to start with before too long.
>  I really am not qualified to offer tips to anyone here but on 
> the off chance that no one has thought of it, perhaps we could generate 
> an SVG animation locally, use a screencasting application and then save 
> it as  whatever-common-video-format.
>   
This is not a bad idea for the interim and long-term (it's also been
discussed on -devel), but certainly it's not a replacement for SMIL, for
obvious reasons.
> With a browser identification we could then load the animated SVG to the 
> browser that supports it and the whatever-common-video-format to the others.
>   
That's also a good plan, so long as it doesn't end up making us forget
about SVG animations :)

JF

I run IE7 with the Adobe SVG plugin. The file armyofclonesani.svg runs 
well
on my machine. This file uses the svg tag <animateTransform>.

On the other hand, the file weirdclock.svg does not run under IE7. It 
uses
what appears to be javascript. This file does run well under SeaMonkey,
which is free.

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On Mon, 4 Aug 2008 04:35:07 -0700 (PDT)
Alvin Penner <penner@vaxxine.com> wrote:

> I run IE7 with the Adobe SVG plugin.

If you look at Adobe's site I think they're dropping support for that
plugin soon...

Cheers -Terry

Yes, and one can only hope that they will continue to allow the download
anyways, with or without support, because otherwise we may have a 
problem.
    Actually it looks like it has been some time since anybody at Adobe
worked on this, I'm running version 3.03 Build 94 for Windows XP, and on
their download website they give a release date of April 2005 for this.
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Dumb question-  wouldn't it be possible to turn inkview into an IE 
plugin?

Rob A

Rob Antonishen wrote:
> Dumb question-  wouldn't it be possible to turn inkview into an IE plugin?
>
> Rob A
>
>   
I'm sure it would be possible. But, however it would take expertise with
Windows and writing IE plugins. We have few enough windows developers as
is so as of right now we will probably not be able do this. If you know
someone who could  do this or you are willing to code it yourself, I'm
sure you get whatever support you need.

Joshua L. Blocher
verbalshadow