You can write programs to animate things using the DOM to change
positions etc. on SVG nodes.
Or, you can use SMIL, which is part of SVG, to tell things to move along
paths in various ways, speeding up and slowing down and so on, or to
interpolate between key positions.
Or both-- use DOM to write SMIL elements and change their attributes. If
it was just a football game minding its own business in the background
repeating on a loop, SMIL with no script would be a very concise way to
do it. If it needs to react to things, DOM + SMIL would save having to
have a JavaScript interval for every single frame of the animation.
With enough artistic skill you could make something that looked like a
proper animated cartoon.
I did a few smil pages a few years ago. The w3c has a smil2 validator
at
http://validator.w3.org/ . Smil is an XML language. Although
various browsers claim to support some smil, I have yet to find one
that will support a complex smil2 page. As for many other xml things,
you need a player to view it. Real has long contained a smil player
that supports most of smil2. For your own use, that is no problem
since the Real player is a free download. For use on a web page by
others, many would have to download the Real player first, because
Real is not as popular for media as it once was. There were/are pay
smil players, but very few are likely to have these installed.
If you have a fairly recent Real player installed, see
http://www.cwdjr.net/smil2/SMILshow.smil . If offered to play, select
the Real player only. Or you often will be offered to download the
page which you can open in the Real player. When on Real, select view
zoom > Original Size for best response . If you want to view the
smil2 code, right click when on the Real player and select to view
source. Or you can go to the w3c validator, and select to show source
code when you validate. Do not try to open the page on the QT player.
QT supports a limited part of smil1, and apparently thinks it should
be able to open the page. It displays one static image, outputs
digital noise at full volume, and crashes- a bit of a jolt to the ears
and might burn out speakers driven by high power amplifiers. In the
unlikely event you have a pay smil player, some of the smil code may
need to be changed. You will notice some of the media urls start with
chtml instead of html. The c tells Real to cache the media in a
special Real cache. Thus the "c" should be removed for smil players
other than Real or they may not be able to find the url page. You will
notice that smil can include both audio and video. In the case of
video, you may have to convert your video files to Real format ones.
Although I do not think Real will accept flash movies directly, for a
modern flv/swf movie there likely are converters to convert the flv to
a Real video format. Thus you could use both smil and flash video on
the same page, which might be a powerful combination.
In addition, if you have access to the server, one with Apache on it
often will have a graphics php extension that can be used for many
types of visual effects.
