Is SMIL for SVG deprecated, un-deprecated or... paused but will eventually be deprecated?

Question

TLDR: I'm trying to establish whether it's worth spending some time mastering SMIL . The official line (at least from Blink, but maybe not from Gecko) appears to be that this animation technology is functionally deprecated ... but the reality on the ground suggests this isn't the case at all.

I would like to learn SMIL because it strikes me as an elegant technology - but I don't wish to spend a couple of months this year learning something which will be obsolete in a year or two.

Question: Is it worth learning SMIL ?

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A few years ago, the consensus was that the SVG 's animation language, SMIL ( Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language ) was going to be deprecated:

In April 2015, the Blink team wrote:

"We intend to deprecate SMIL animations in favor of CSS animations and Web animations"

Source: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/5o0yiO440LM )

The two main reasons for the intent-to-deprecate five and a half years ago appeared to be:

• "In terms of implementation, SMIL adds significant complexity to Blink"
• "Internet Explorer does not support SMIL which limited its use for critical functionality"

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Roll forward to 2020 and Internet Explorer is lost in the mists of time and MSIE's successor, Edge , now uses the Blink rendering engine (alongside Chromium , Chrome , Opera , Brave and others).

Blink 's main competitor, Gecko , also appears completely happy with SMIL :

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/SVG_animation_with_SMIL

The net result is that SMIL now has strong support across the entire modern browser landscape:

• https://caniuse.com/svg-smil

So where are we, now ? Can we safely forget about the intention-to-deprecate from 2015 and work on the basis that SMIL is back and here to stay?

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The proposed duplicate question and its answers provide good references to Blink's initial announcement that it intends to deprecate SMIL and later announcement that it intends to pause the deprecation of SMIL (which it will resume later). But the discussion is from 2016. The question does not contemplate whether, in 2020, SMIL advocates might (?) have quietly prevailed and, despite lack of official clarification, there may no longer be any determined intention to deprecate SMIL at all. (For instance, there never seems to be any enthusiasm from Gecko to deprecate SMIL, does there?)

Answer 1

TLDR: I'm trying to establish whether it's worth spending some time mastering SMIL . The official line (at least from Blink, but maybe not from Gecko) appears to be that this animation technology is functionally deprecated ... but the reality on the ground suggests this isn't the case at all.

I would like to learn SMIL because it strikes me as an elegant technology - but I don't wish to spend a couple of months this year learning something which will be obsolete in a year or two.

Question: Is it worth learning SMIL ?

---

A few years ago, the consensus was that the SVG 's animation language, SMIL ( Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language ) was going to be deprecated:

In April 2015, the Blink team wrote:

"We intend to deprecate SMIL animations in favor of CSS animations and Web animations"

Source: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/5o0yiO440LM )

The two main reasons for the intent-to-deprecate five and a half years ago appeared to be:

• "In terms of implementation, SMIL adds significant complexity to Blink"
• "Internet Explorer does not support SMIL which limited its use for critical functionality"

---

Roll forward to 2020 and Internet Explorer is lost in the mists of time and MSIE's successor, Edge , now uses the Blink rendering engine (alongside Chromium , Chrome , Opera , Brave and others).

Blink 's main competitor, Gecko , also appears completely happy with SMIL :

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/SVG_animation_with_SMIL

The net result is that SMIL now has strong support across the entire modern browser landscape:

• https://caniuse.com/svg-smil

So where are we, now ? Can we safely forget about the intention-to-deprecate from 2015 and work on the basis that SMIL is back and here to stay?

---

The proposed duplicate question and its answers provide good references to Blink's initial announcement that it intends to deprecate SMIL and later announcement that it intends to pause the deprecation of SMIL (which it will resume later). But the discussion is from 2016. The question does not contemplate whether, in 2020, SMIL advocates might (?) have quietly prevailed and, despite lack of official clarification, there may no longer be any determined intention to deprecate SMIL at all. (For instance, there never seems to be any enthusiasm from Gecko to deprecate SMIL, does there?)

Answer 2

The deprecation of SMIL got suspended . To quote, in case the site changes:

Although Chrome 45 deprecated SMIL in favor of CSS animations and Web animations, the Chrome developers have since suspended that deprecation.

Quoting from the link:

As a result, we've decided to suspend our intent to deprecate and take smaller steps toward other options.

SMIL not only can do awesome things, and have extra powers over eg. CSS animations, it lends another way of thinking about DOM animations. I think it's useful even if it's rarely used. Some alternatives eg. CSS Houdini have been in the making for years, with no cross-browser availability. So it's up to each person if it's worth it; depends on time available. Can be done for fun too. Same can be said about JS (non-SMIL) libraries like Lottie/Bodymovin too