Posted on by Mark Finkle

Shenanigans! on Webkit SMIL

I have always thought that SVG would be great for the Web (more the graphics part and less the sockets part). I also think SMIL would be a good to create nice and smooth animations. Having an animation system built natively into the browser would likely be better than using JavaScript and setTimeout.

With this in mind, I was hoping that Opera and, recently, Webkit support for SMIL would make a compelling case for adding the feature to Firefox. We have a bitrotted patch that has promise. But then I saw Jeff Schiller’s report on how well Webkit supports SMIL. A score of 5/116 isn’t very compelling, especially with Opera’s 110/116 score. Come on Webkit! I need you to support SMIL better than that!

Check out Jeff’s SVG support matrix for a better idea of how well browsers support SVG.

6 Replies to “Shenanigans! on Webkit SMIL”

  1. We will be adding more SMIL support. The implementation is just in the beginning stages.

  2. If we shipped an Acid 3-compliant Safari with a score of 5/116 on a SMIL compliance test, then I think “shenanigans” would be an appropriate thing to say.

    However, simply having a publicly available nightly build in which we have re-enabled a feature that we were already working on prior to Acid 3… where’s the problem?

  3. Hasn’t IE had some support for SMIL since version 5.5? Seems like its had little to no impact on the web at all.

  5. I think nobody ever thought sockets should be part of a graphics spec. Some however thought sockets would be great for many applications using those graphics. The difference is mostly a (wise or not) strategy to get a working combination implementation in the hands of content developers as far as i know.

    I’m glad all the serious browser builders are now ‘fighting’ over SVG implementations however: competition on open standards implementations is good news to most content developers.

  6. Comparing where the gaps are in the Schiller report, I wonder would Adobe be amenable to releasing their more or less abandoned SVG 3 and 6PR plugins’ code to Mozilla in a similar way to the Tamarin co-operation.

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