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Comment by adyus | Hacker News Reader

Without knowing this fact about Raphael, I was about to reply to another comment prematurely. I was going to complain that having the same author as Raphael doesn't explain why Snap.js exists, instead of a better version of Raphael.

Thank you.

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There's a helpful "Why Snap?" page that points this out, as well as that it supports animation.

SMIL is the SVG animation markup. Sadly very few people have every used it. SvgWow.com has a bunch of great examples like: http://svg-wow.org/camera/camera.xhtml

There's an awful lot of Javascript backing that animation, I can't see where it's being turned into SMIL. At the very least it's definitely not static on the page, since the definition of the animation is entirely in JS: http://svg-wow.org/camera/camera.js

Does it write SMIL somewhere near the end and then let it run, or does it just run in JS? Skimming through I couldn't tell, but I don't really have time to read more closely.

Some JS is still used, certainly. However you can define the animation steps, timings, recursion, panning, zooming and many other facets purely in SVG/SMIL. When I wrote a financial world map visualization and drill down tool, 95% of the animation logic was in SVG/SMIL. The JS just called start/stop on the various animation elements.

Alas, I was suffering from TLDR syndrome. I will definitely give Snap a try, along with seeing if it plays well with Raphael for graceful degradation for older browsers.

That's the point, RaphaelJs is to allow SVG use on IE by converting it to VML.

Aye aye, coupled with Modernizr, it should solve (most) use cases.

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