Although Chrome 45 deprecated SMIL in favor of CSS animations and Web animations, the Chrome developers have since suspended that deprecation.
Gecko 2.0 (Firefox 4 / Thunderbird 3.3 / SeaMonkey 2.1) introduced support for animating SVG using Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL). SMIL allows you to:
- animate the numeric attributes of an element (x, y, ...)
- animate transform attributes (translation or rotation)
- animate color attributes
- follow a motion path
This is done adding an SVG element like
inside the SVG element to animate. Below are examples for the four different ways.As of Chrome 45.0, SMIL animations are deprecated in favor of CSS animations and Web animations.
Animating attributes of an element
The following example animates the cx attribute of a circle. To do so, we add an
- attributeName
- The name of the attribute to animate.
- from
- The initial value of the attribute.
- to
- The final value.
- dur
- The duration of the animation (for example, write '5s' for 5 seconds).
If you want to animate more attributes inside the same element, just add more <animate>
elements.
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Attribute Animation with SMIL</title> </head> <body> <svg width="300px" height="100px"> <rect x="0" y="0" width="300" height="100" stroke="black" stroke-width="1" /> <circle cx="0" cy="50" r="15" fill="blue" stroke="black" stroke-width="1"> <animate attributeName="cx" from="0" to="100" dur="5s" repeatCount="indefinite" /> </circle> </svg> </body> </html>
Animating the transform attributes
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>SVG SMIL Animate with transform</title> </head> <body> <svg width="300px" height="100px"> <rect x="0" y="0" width="300" height="100" stroke="black" stroke-width="1" /> <rect x="0" y="50" width="15" height="34" fill="blue" stroke="black" stroke-width="1" transform="rotation"> <animateTransform attributeName="transform" begin="0s" dur="20s" type="rotate" <!-- Rotate from 0 to 360 degrees, and move from 60 to 100 in the x direction. --> from="0 60 60" to="360 100 60" <!-- Keep doing this until the drawing no longer exists. --> repeatCount="indefinite" /> </rect> </svg> </body> </html>
Animation following a path
The path is defined the same way as in
Example 1: Linear motion
In this example, a blue circle bounces between the left and right edges of a black box, over and over again, indefinitely. The animation here is handled by the <animateMotion>
element. In this case, we're establishing a path consisting of a MoveTo command to establish the starting point for the animation, then the Horizontal-line command to move the circle 300 pixels to the right, followed by the Z command, which closes the path, establishing a loop back to the beginning. By setting the value of the repeatCount attribute to indefinite
, we indicate that the animation should loop forever, as long as the SVG image exists.
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>SVG SMIL Animate with Path</title> </head> <body> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="300px" height="100px"> <rect x="0" y="0" width="300" height="100" stroke="black" stroke-width="1" /> <circle cx="0" cy="50" r="15" fill="blue" stroke="black" stroke-width="1"> <animateMotion path="M 0 0 H 300 Z" dur="3s" repeatCount="indefinite" /> </circle> </svg> </body> </html>
Example 2: Curved motion
Same example as before with a curved path and following the direction of the path.
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>SVG SMIL Animate with Path</title> </head> <body> <svg width="300px" height="100px"> <rect x="0" y="0" width="300" height="100" stroke="black" stroke-width="1" /> <rect x="0" y="0" width="20" height="20" fill="blue" stroke="black" stroke-width="1"> <animateMotion path="M 250,80 H 50 Q 30,80 30,50 Q 30,20 50,20 H 250 Q 280,20,280,50 Q 280,80,250,80Z" dur="3s" repeatCount="indefinite" rotate="auto"> </rect> </svg> </body> </html>