SMIL on?

I was chatting with Andy Clarke the other day about a new article he wants to write about SVG animations.

“I’ve read some things that said that SMIL might be a dead end.” He said. “Whaddya think?”

That was my impression, too. Sarah Drasner summed up the situation nicely way back in 2017:

Unfortunately, support for SMIL is waning in WebKit, and has never (nor will likely ever) exist for Microsoft’s IE or Edge browsers. 

Chrome was also in on the party and published an intent to deprecate SMIL, citing work in other browsers to support SVG animations in CSS. MDN linked to that same thread in its SMIL documentation when it published a deprecation warning.

Well, Chrome never deprecated SMIL. At least according to this reply in the thread dated 2023. And since then, we’ve also seen Microsoft’s Edge adopt a Chromium engine, effectively making it a Chrome clone. Also, last I checked, Caniuse reports full support in WebKit browsers.

Now, I’m not saying that SMIL is perfectly alive and well. It could still very well be in the doldrums, especially when there are robust alternatives in CSS and JavaScript. But it’s also not dead in the water.

SMIL on? originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.