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Those sample files.. bring back memories. I think we took a step backwards in serving vector art/animation on the web. When YouTube replaced Flash, we've probab

by lxe 6y ago

Those sample files.. bring back memories. I think we took a step backwards in serving vector art/animation on the web. When YouTube replaced Flash, we've probably wasted petabytes of bandwidth serving rasterized content when Flash or a similar format would have been much more effective.

mofosyne 6y ago
A standard at least for encoding vector animation would be nice. Also needs to be not as bulky as having svg frame per frame, etc...
- jazzyjackson 6y ago
  I have a similar problem in mind, it could be an SVG served in a web browser, and then instead of frames you would have an event series of updates, kind of like MIDI does for music: turns certain notes on and off at certain times. So I could have a timestamped list of updates to apply to the SVG (move to x / y coordinate, apply this filter, append these childNodes) -- just use CSS transition to interpolate the movement from one coordinate to the next. You could stream these updates from the server at very low bandwidth.
  - matt_kantor 6y ago
    I've never authored SVGs so this might be a dumb question, but couldn't you use CSS keyframe animations for this? You wouldn't get streaming, but what about the rest?
- ghayes 6y ago
  Not sure if this went far enough (even before it was deprecated), but SMIL was a standard for vector animation: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/SVG_animation_with_SMIL https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/SVG_animati...
  - chrismorgan 6y ago
    Though as noted there, Chrome recanted on its 2015 attempt at killing SMIL—and it was only ever Chrome that were labelling SMIL as deprecated, no one else does so. Four years after that, I haven’t heard any more talk about killing it. Notwithstanding that, CSS is now able to cover a lot more of the SMIL use cases than it was then.
fulafel 6y ago
SVG is much better at vector art use cases. Flash was horrible from user pov (constant os and browser compatibility problems, unending stream of weekly "ads can pwn your computer" level security holes, proprietary black box nature, ate your battery, hard to procedurally generate, didn't integrate with the web and dom, etc etc).
- pbronez 6y ago
  All true, but there’s such a massive library of content for Flash that they must have done _something_ right. Maybe it was just luck, maybe timing, but it’s amazing to me that so many games and videos are caught in this particular technical dead end. My understanding is that HTML5 just never offered the same primitives for content creation, but I’m unsure why there was no economic incentive to create them.
  - rictic 6y ago
    The flash editor was high quality, and catered to animators.
  - kmeisthax 6y ago
    Adobe Flash/Animate provided a best-in-class animation and vector art package that still has little competition. Animate can actually export to HTML5, but they didn't bother using the SVG/SMIL animation model. Instead, they pre-render everything as a series of spritesheets and render them to a canvas. I can see why they did this - the SVG and canvas vector rendering models are different enough to make blindly rendering SWF content to it cause rendering artifacts. (It's one of our biggest longstanding bugs in Ruffle - canvas masks just look weird.) However, Adobe could have ameliorated this either in the exporter, the authoring environment, or by pushing for Flash-style mask options in web standards that deal with vector rendering. Instead, they went with the far worse but quicker option of prerendering so they could say "hey we totally do HTML5 now".
- untog 6y ago
  I’m not sure that’s true when factoring in performance. Every time I’ve tried to animate SVG it’s been an absolute CPU hog in a way Flash never was. Not saying we should stick with Flash but I don’t think SVGs are a complete answer today either.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Adobe Animate, which is basically just Adobe Flash with a different name, can export htm5 for the web. I haven’t used it extensively, but it seems to work well.

by lxe 6y ago

mofosyne 6y ago

A standard at least for encoding vector animation would be nice. Also needs to be not as bulky as having svg frame per frame, etc...

jazzyjackson 6y ago
I have a similar problem in mind, it could be an SVG served in a web browser, and then instead of frames you would have an event series of updates, kind of like MIDI does for music: turns certain notes on and off at certain times. So I could have a timestamped list of updates to apply to the SVG (move to x / y coordinate, apply this filter, append these childNodes) -- just use CSS transition to interpolate the movement from one coordinate to the next. You could stream these updates from the server at very low bandwidth.
- matt_kantor 6y ago
  I've never authored SVGs so this might be a dumb question, but couldn't you use CSS keyframe animations for this? You wouldn't get streaming, but what about the rest?
ghayes 6y ago
Not sure if this went far enough (even before it was deprecated), but SMIL was a standard for vector animation: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/SVG_animation_with_SMIL https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/SVG_animati...
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  Though as noted there, Chrome recanted on its 2015 attempt at killing SMIL—and it was only ever Chrome that were labelling SMIL as deprecated, no one else does so. Four years after that, I haven’t heard any more talk about killing it. Notwithstanding that, CSS is now able to cover a lot more of the SMIL use cases than it was then.

fulafel 6y ago

SVG is much better at vector art use cases. Flash was horrible from user pov (constant os and browser compatibility problems, unending stream of weekly "ads can pwn your computer" level security holes, proprietary black box nature, ate your battery, hard to procedurally generate, didn't integrate with the web and dom, etc etc).

pbronez 6y ago
All true, but there’s such a massive library of content for Flash that they must have done _something_ right. Maybe it was just luck, maybe timing, but it’s amazing to me that so many games and videos are caught in this particular technical dead end. My understanding is that HTML5 just never offered the same primitives for content creation, but I’m unsure why there was no economic incentive to create them.
- rictic 6y ago
  The flash editor was high quality, and catered to animators.
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  Adobe Flash/Animate provided a best-in-class animation and vector art package that still has little competition. Animate can actually export to HTML5, but they didn't bother using the SVG/SMIL animation model. Instead, they pre-render everything as a series of spritesheets and render them to a canvas. I can see why they did this - the SVG and canvas vector rendering models are different enough to make blindly rendering SWF content to it cause rendering artifacts. (It's one of our biggest longstanding bugs in Ruffle - canvas masks just look weird.) However, Adobe could have ameliorated this either in the exporter, the authoring environment, or by pushing for Flash-style mask options in web standards that deal with vector rendering. Instead, they went with the far worse but quicker option of prerendering so they could say "hey we totally do HTML5 now".
untog 6y ago
I’m not sure that’s true when factoring in performance. Every time I’ve tried to animate SVG it’s been an absolute CPU hog in a way Flash never was. Not saying we should stick with Flash but I don’t think SVGs are a complete answer today either.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

Adobe Animate, which is basically just Adobe Flash with a different name, can export htm5 for the web. I haven’t used it extensively, but it seems to work well.