At the time of writing, the future does not look very bright. Attached is a paper that expresses our views on the current state.
The most likely scenario for 2016:
- Declarative animation will be dropped from SVG 1.1 in favour of animated transitions in CSS. This appears to have the support of Google, Mozilla and Microsoft.
- CSS animation facilities are unlikely to provide comparable support for declarative animation as that provided by SVG:
- Not being XML-based, the ability to generate and manipulate declarative animation to improve efficiency will be lost
- The size of files will increase significantly with the verbosity of CSS
- Path definitions in SVG will also have to appear in CSS as animated values. CSS does not normally handle complex data values such as an SVG path definition. The semicolon is already overloaded in its usage in CSS so that there will almost certainly be a need for syntactic changes to the SVG values attribute.
- The bloated transition effects functionality to be added to CSS will make SVG's simple declarative animation functionality more difficult to render.
- SVG 2.0 is likely to have a separate animation elements functionality to replace SVG 1.1's declarative animation functionality. This is in its early stage of development so is unlikely to appear before 2017 at the earliest. There is a proposal that this should be implemented in Javascript for consistency. The likelihood of that producing efficient compiled declarative animation is low.