> We firmly believe that SMIL is not in the best long-term interests of the open web platform for several reasons:
> * There is no clear path towards broad cross-browser support.
> * The vendors which support SMIL have implementations that continue to vary widely, even after more than a decade of support.
> * There are high-quality cross-platform replacement features on the horizon.
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...
That still sounds very "obsolete" to me.
CSS animations also solve the performance problem because they can be GPU accelerated.
There is also JS animation option which has many flaws. I guess it is impossible to accelerate on GPU, it forces imperative instead of declarative animation style and you have to execute someone's code in order to show graphics/animation.
I don't think SMIL (or even SVG) is perfect, but it is still the best option for open vector graphics standard. Maybe a much smaller subset would be something all mayor players could agree to support? The transpiler to shader language would be a good solution for performance issues.
Animation being only the tip of the issues, the moment you rely on anything, that isn't a filled polygon with no stroke, SVG support and compability starts falling apart in the most unexpected places.
