Not fake news: Facebook reinvents SVG Thanks to Facebook, you too can festoon your mobile applications with high-quality, low-overhead vector animations. The social media and data-harvesting giant on Tuesday released its Keyframes library for exporting Adobe After Effects animations so they can be rendered in Android and iOS apps. Facebook developed Keyframes for …
Web animations API is already shaping up to be an excellent replacement for SMIL and CSS based animation.
There's zero need for this not-invented-here facebook/adobe crap on the web.
It's great there's another specification out there, but if it's not currently supported on IE, and doesn't even have Android and iOS implementations on the distant horizon, are you really surprised that a company with a lot of engineering talent should choose a different approach?
It's no good "It'll be great in a few years time when everyone adopts it" if it's needed now.
Web Animations are supported on Android >= 5. And there are polyfills, although I don't know how good they are.
Although, given Google's track record, it might not be supported on SVG. (Yes Chrome teams: why don't you remove dataset on SVGElement and then, when everybody found the last of the bugs that caused, add it back. FFS.)
And probably a chatbot also... but in my experience, almost any animation in UIs are nice the first few times you see them, then just get in the way because they waste user time.
Just a few days ago I had to undergo some mandatory training (the e-learning flavour). The moron who prepared the course thought it was a great idea to use a lot of animations (including text appearing in a typewrite style). What you could probably read in fifteen minutes took an hour and a half at least, waiting for all the animations to finish...
But some animations could be useful, if very little intrusive. Windows that minimize "shrinking" toward the taskbar may give a hint where you can find the window again later. The animation need to be quick and simple - things that slowly slide, scroll, open, or the like become quickly a pain. More complex animations even more.
"The software license for Keyframes is not the commonly used MIT open source license. Rather, it's a BSD-based Facebook license that automatically bans you from using and distributing the code if you directly or indirectly sue Facebook for patent infringement."
I believe the above description to be incorrect. The licence *is* a standard, verbatim 3-clause BSD. What is different is that, along with the licence to use the code itself, they also grant you a licence to use any Farcebook patents that the software, unmodified and standalone, may infringe.
I have no idea why they decided to stick that latter bit on or what the exact implications are. Because of that, personally I would be inclined not to use that code.
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