I love SMIL animations. If you're curious about what you can do, here's a few examples: https://www.pcmaffey.com/roll-your-own-analytics https://www.pcmaffey.com/finally-i-closed-my-linkedin https://www.astronomer.io/404.html (let this play > 1 minute) You can open any of these images and View Source to dive in to the implementation... except for Edge, SMIL plays exactly the same in all browsers, whereas I've found u…
Very nice! I love the idea of small animations to dress up long-form articles, and we don't see it enough on the web because most "content" is written by content marketers and animations I guess are too time-intensive to be considered worthwhile. Could you tell us what the flow looks like? For example, what do you use to create the SVG, clean it up, and import it into SMIL and animate it there? Also, how much time wo…
1. Draw vector art in Infinity Designer on my iPad (with pencil)
2. Export as svg, and then clean it up in Inkscape (simplify paths, finalize shapes, etc).
3. Export Inkscape svg and then optimize it with `svgo --pretty`
4. This results in nice clean svg code that I then hand edit to add the SMIL animations. This involves wrapping objects in tags and adding mostly . Once you get a hang of the syntax (as with any kind of coding) it's relatively easy.
5. Final debugging / testing happens in the browser. Just open the file directly and use the dev tools inspector.
Total time depends, from 2-3 hrs for a simple sketch and animation (eg. the LinkedIn one) to a day or 2 for something complex.