Cameron Adams decided to benchmark Flash, SVG, Canvas and HTML5 using a particle engine he created. Not surprising (to me anyway), the SVG scores were the worst of the bunch. This stands to reason: does each particle really need to be a DOM element? Nonetheless, I decided to see what I could do to make the SVG scores suck less. I thought I'd use it as an opportunity to also teach some techniques.
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?