Animation: Flash is smooth/ DOM is jerky

[petermichaux]

Hi,

Is there any way to make DOM scripted animation smoother? Flash is far
superior in this area. Any one here know what makes Flash so smooth by
comparison?

I don't like the fact that the standards based world is so far behind
the Flash based stuff in some areas (animation and server push in
particular)

Thanks,
Peter

 

[cwdjrxyz]

Hi,

Is there any way to make DOM scripted animation smoother? Flash is far
superior in this area. Any one here know what makes Flash so smooth by
comparison?

I find it difficult to know exactly what you mean without examples of a
flash movie and a dhtml ? animation effect done with script. Just to
start with, a flash, wmv, Real, or QT movie often uses a much higher
frame rate than the rate at which a dhtml animation image is moved. You
could make a dhtml animation much smoother than normal if you used many
more and smaller steps in the motion. At some point you will run into a
wall of how fast you can change position depending on the image size,
the bandwidth of the connection to the web, and the speed of the
computer used. Of course really smooth motion of high resolution images
is best done on a fast broadband connection.

I don't like the fact that the standards based world is so far behind
the Flash based stuff in some areas (animation and server push in
particular)

I and others find that most flash, wmv, Real, QT and other movie
formats can be handled with code that is completely W3C standards
valid, all the way up to xhtml 1.1. You would never know that by
looking at some of the non-standard trash code given on some of the
sites of developers of the various movie formats. It would be better
said that the developers of many of the movie formats are far behind
the current state of official web standards, although this need not be.
In some cases, some developers likely do not care about standards as
long as their code works - at least on their own browsers and/or
players, if they make them.

 

[petermichaux]

I find it difficult to know exactly what you mean without examples of a
flash movie and a dhtml ? animation effect done with script.

Sorry, I didn't really mean movies. I meant interactive stuff like drag
and drop or video games. The flash stuff I've seen is very smooth. The
DHTML stuff is very jerky. With DHTML when dragging, the draggable item
plays jerky catch up with the cursor rather than staying under the
cursor smoothly all the time. Is there a way to make the DHTML of drag
and drop smoother?

Thanks,
Peter

 

[Ian Collins]

Sorry, I didn't really mean movies. I meant interactive stuff like drag
and drop or video games. The flash stuff I've seen is very smooth. The
DHTML stuff is very jerky. With DHTML when dragging, the draggable item
plays jerky catch up with the cursor rather than staying under the
cursor smoothly all the time. Is there a way to make the DHTML of drag
and drop smoother?

Which methods have you tried?

 

[petermichaux]

Which methods have you tried?

Good point. I haven't tried anything too intelligent. Just
repositioning the element to the current cursor location after on a
mouse move. However I think the frame rate/redraw rate must be relative
low because of this example

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/animation/motion_plus.html

Peter