- hi everyone
- I've been looking at animation support and evaluating the competition. also I found a javascript implementation of the web animations api which may be the animation engine to support as it's getting native support in browsers. that doesn't limit us by not allowing support for snap or GSAP on top of this. web animations API works with css and svg and provides interfaces to animation, keyframes and timelines. - - https://github.com/web-animations/web-animations-js
https://github.com/web-animations/web-animations-js github.com *web-animations/web-animations-js* https://github.com/web-animations/web-animations-js JavaScript implementation of the Web Animations API - web-animations/web-animations-js
- SVGator, a commercial svg animator supports javascript (using it's custom engine) or css - I still wouldn't suggest supporting any old javascript, but a cut down version of javascript where complex functions get replaced with stubs that return some default value and the code can be evaluated to get the animation (limited by what javascript functionality is implemented) and property settings for the animation can be traced. I would do this roughly by using the built in parser in the javascript engine to calculate animation settings to be presented in the UI. the commercial svg animation tool SVGator supports javascript and css. it doesn't allow the javascript to be modified in the application, I haven't tried importing and svg file with modified javascript. it may also be a good idea to support snap or GSAP ontop of this, on the other hand, they may become obsolete as web animation s API gets full support and people start writing functions for it such as the morph one found here https://coherent-labs.com/Documentation/cpp-gameface/d1/dea/shape_morphing.h... - - for instance, simple loops may be supported, but more complex(that use the result of a function call to determine the loop[ conditions) ones may be too complex to support rationally - Doing this loses nothing as the animation will still run in a browser, but Inkscape may only support animations with complex functionality partitioning - Accurate animation playback can still be supported by executing the javascipt but I would limit imports to trusted javascript and not any old javascript for reasons of side effects and security.
there are already shims that implement SMIL in javascript, and assuming they allow you to position the timeline and query keyframes and object attributes they should allow for a relatively straight forward SMIL implementation so long as javascript is supported.
this proposal sees inkscape supporting SMIL, CSS and javascript. the Web Animations API implementation should allow for the support of CSS without any javascript but can still be used for the actual process of animating and setting the timeline position.
at the moment I'm still working on importing text from pdf files in scribus. I have most of the functionality already implemented for this out just requires a bit of polish. to do that I'm going to refactor the code to use a simple framework that should make the code a lot cleaner, be faster and support all the features for the Polish needed to have a decent implementation.