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