Hello all,
I for one applaud this incentive. It's a long standing desire of the whole SVG community to have Inkscape support animation I think.
I did a web design course in 2012 in which I made my design students create a website in SVG using Inkscape, notepad++ and Opera 11. One of the assignments was to add animation using SMIL and I made this simple example of how to create a repeating frame based animation. It works in Opera 9.5 - 12.16, but not in their Blink versions. Firefox works fine as well. Blink has a nasty bug/regression/security issue? that prevents external files to be <use>d.
http://pjmulder.home.xs4all.nl/svg/exanples/frame_anim/anim.svg
Based upon my experience teaching I would like to address the following points.
1. One of the things it does which is currently not supported by Inkscape is to use external SVG files. I would really be a great addition to the functionality of Inkscape if it did. The new Symbol manager already opens external files but then copies content from these file rather than linking them. I'd love to see that as an option to link externally, much like we do with bitmap images. It would make files a wee bit cleaner. There also would need to be an option to collect all linked files into a single whopper for portability. More difficult it would be but quite interesting, to be able to disassemble files into multiple ones again.
2. SMIL is a really easily understandable format for all. ECMAscript is unintelligible for the non coder, but I managed to teach each and every student how to move objects around using SMIL. CSS is a work in progress and to be honest I think it is an ugly way of doing anything really. It always feels like engineering your graphics, much like Postscript editing before the invention of Pagemaker, but then without knowing the context of your objects. CSS is too abstract for most people.
3. If however the SMIL code is just plunked into the overall SVG graphics file, the readability becomes zero. I therefore made them separate the SMIL logic from the graphic content. This has two advantages, they could easily edit the graphics content of their animation, reposition objects in their scene files and all that without influencing the logic code. SMIL also allows for editing the content at two levels. You can either edit the resource file or the <use>
4. Based upon this I would suggest for animation there to be a project file structure rather than single files. It would be useful for normal Inkscape projects too as you often want to separate images from your files rather than have them bloat the whole file and want to be able to use placeholders and replaceable content.
Regards,
Jelle Mulder
On Sun, 01 Dec 2013 06:24:30 +0800, inkscape-devel-request@lists.sourceforge.net wrote:
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Today's Topics:
- Re: SMIL in SVG (Susan Spencer)
- Re: Inkscape and SMIL support (Susan Spencer)
- Re: SMIL in SVG (Martin Owens)
- Re: Inkscape and SMIL support (Martin Owens)
- Re: Inkscape and SMIL support (Susan Spencer)
- Re: Inkscape and SMIL support (Susan Spencer)
Message: 1 Date: Sat, 30 Nov 2013 15:28:15 -0600 From: Susan Spencer <susan.spencer@...400...> Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] SMIL in SVG To: Tavmjong Bah <tavmjong@...8...> Cc: "inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net" inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Message-ID: <CAFi3o2UOgK+AJFTm2g_DWhyK_m9ONQZmhtXb34STWegoTV+j_g@...401...> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Should IE's lack of support prevent Inkscape from incorporating SMIL?
There should be some consensus on this.