This day was five-and-a-half years in the making: the initial patch to add SMIL support has landed on Mozilla trunk. SMIL is the Open Web way of doing declarative animation, I use it on my site here and there via FakeSmile. This Mozilla patch is partial support for SMIL within SVG only (not HTML). Note that SMIL support is disabled in the build by default, as roc says "we should enable it when we've got enough implemented that we wouldn't feel embarrassed about shipping it. " - but this is a significant step forward.

Thanks and congratulations go to Daniel, Brian and Robert! Also thanks to Erik and Ian for putting some SMIL tests into Acid3. Not that this had anything to do with it. Oh, no. 😉

Opera has supported SMIL in SVG for a couple years now. Anyone want to place bets on who will be the second to release a browser that supports it? Mozilla? Apple? Google? Microsoft? What, did I say something funny?

§516 · January 15, 2009 · Firefox, RIA, Software, SVG, Technology, Web · Tags: , , , , · [Print]

5 Comments to “Houston, the SMIL has landed”

  1. Ajang Laing says:

    Now, that’s a great news! I’ve been following for quite some time.

    Finally, but unfortunately it won’t be making into the upcoming Fx 3.1 release. Maybe Fx 3.2?

  2. Fyrd says:

    Excellent news! My bets are on Apple, maybe Google being the next, since they started support in the webkit nightlies back in September. And it should be a while before Firefox 3.2 is released…

  3. Shelley says:

    Oh, my bet is on Microsoft.

  4. Mardeg says:

    You may as well replace both the Firefox3pre+SMIL and Firefox3.1a1pre+SMIL entries at

    http://www.codedread.com/svg-support.php

    with a single one of Firefox3.2a1pre+SMIL since that will be the version to actually enable it.

  5. Alex says:

    My money’s on the WebKit guys, although I’d rather some more generic SVG bugs be fixed first (it has issue scaling a file to fit the specified viewport)