Hello
I first read from here:
https://plus.google.com/+GoldenRibbon/posts/HusmkaFm9Z6

In Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comment ... _browsers/

SMIL SVG animations can now play on all browsers thanks to this polyfill created by Google:

https://github.com/ericwilligers/svg-animation

If all is true, and all is correct, I think this is a "game-changer".

Last thing I heard was they wanted to deprecate SMIL in Chrome... Interesting - and nice - 180° turnaround.

Hello Moini

From my point of view it's easier to animate with SMIL, than with CSS, and more powerful. . And even more than using JavaScript libraries.
The problem was the support for MS web browsers.

On the other hand, as you said, SMIL was dead.

I mean, It sounds so good, that can't be true.

Well, theoretically they can now deprecate it without making everyone cry out loudly... Did you know youtube was using (or wanted to use?) SMIL for its video icons?... The youtube guys weren't happy about what the Chrome people planned to do...

The reason I favoured SMIL was that it didn't require any additional js... (and that it was easy to understand - I haven't actually used it, only looked at what you need to do, and I found it looked a lot easier than both other methods, and provided more flexibility because of the ability to animate paths).

Can someone give a simple explanation what "polyfill" is? I looked up in WP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyfill) and it sounds like some code that would have to be included on the webpage with the SMIL code, so that after Chrome drops it (if it actually does drop it, as reported) it would still play in Chrome?

Is that about right?

If that's correct, then theoretically, all browsers could drop SMIL and this code would still make it work? Or does this code only make it work for Chrome?

I don't know. Based on my VERY limited understanding, it seems like it would have to be a LOT of extra code?

Correct. It's a javascript file that needs to be included in the web page where you use SMIL, and that replaces the browser's own knowledge about SMIL, if the browser has no clue what to do with it.

(The javascript files in that repo over at gh are about 200kb - and they can still be compressed. So they are not so very large, in comparison with images, at least.)

See also:
http://tavmjong.free.fr/blog/?p=1583
search for "Path morphing" to find the interesting part

There's no search feature -- but that section is roughly 4/5 down the page.

Ctrl + F is what I usually do. The browser has an excellent search option.

Oh, look at that! My new thing to learn today

Hello,
It seems that still it's "not mature"

Let me explain
I wanted to try a special feature with SMIL animation, which you can't do it with CSS, and It is relative complex to do in Java script.
I'm talking about "animateMotion":
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/doc ... mateMotion

Well, I created following the "recipe" that appears in the first link... and It didn't work on MS web browsers, and in Chrome yielded warning messages.

I decided to post is an issue in the github of the project, where you can see more details:
https://github.com/ericwilligers/svg-an ... /issues/41

Maybe I'm missing something