From 2003 to 2015, we animated the IW3C2 World Wide Web Conference logos at the Opening Ceremony.

This part of this site describes the animation of the Conference logos using the W3C vector graphics standard, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), which is now supported by all the major browsers.

The IW3C2 aim initially was to have a SMIL multimedia presentation at the opening session showing that the Conference Series had reached the 12th event in Budapest. Due to lack of time, this fell through and we (Bob and Paul Hopgood) volunteered to do an SVG animation recognising that in the time available (under six months in our spare time) that it would not be as good as we might like.

In consequence, the first 12 are relatively routine as they were done quite quickly. Our main interests were to show off what could be done with SVG and, in particular, show that synchronised soundtracks could be achieved. Once the requirement was just one new animation per year, more effort could be expended in our spare time to create each. In consequence, the animations after Budapest are longer and exploit SVG as well as we could.

In the 1994-2003 section, the page for each conference gives the logo for the conference and the logo animation. Clicking on the bottom right arrow will cause the animation to start.

Click on the sound button to hear the soundtrack that we used to accompany the logo animation.

The later sections give more information on how the longer individual logos were created.

The music was all created with Mark of The Unicorn's (MOTU) Digital Performer of various versions over the years:

http://www.motu.com/products/software/dp

The earlier years also used various outboard sound modules and recorders but later years have been produced entirely in the computer using MOTU's software products plus Arturia's Moog Modular:

http://www.arturia.com/products/analog-classics/modular-v/overview

The major tool used to define the SVG animations was a text editor. However, we built up a significant set of XSLT transformations to make life easy when massaging existing SVG documents and creating complex scenes. We called these path_ology and both the library itself and a description of the library is included here.

By 2016, the original motivation for animating the conference logos had disappeared. The conference was now a regular venue for web-related papers. Also, at the time, Google and Mozilla had announced that they would no longer support SVG's declarative animation features believing time-related changes could be defined via CSS transitions, despite it being quite clear that substantial animations are beyond the capability of CSS. Today, 2017, SVG animation support still exists in all major browsers other than Microsoft's Edge.