Obviously Web Animations look very good given they seem to solve the (IMO) worst weakness of SMIL - time manipulation. In SMIL to get the same effect you'd have to approximate local time by complex easings and cut/reverse parts of animation depending on the direction of local time. Web Animations took a much more reasonable approach (I was actually puzzled SMIL had such a flaw in its design).
However, as a producer of a professional animation tool I can't wait until Web Animations show up finally someday, but have to address the need expressed by customers that call for open vector animations working on all devices right now - and SMIL was the only one that could have address that. Now, there's nothing until web animations show up, and we can't be guaranteed that the final implementations will be anywhere near promised functionality.
Even just retaining SMIL in its current state would have been much better than just outright dropping it for any kind of continuity. We will obviously provide Web Animations as well, but with the deprecation of SMIL we lost a stop-gap declarative solution for majority of mobile devices, and frankly I don't understand such a haste in dropping it (just sustaining it in Chrome at its current state can't be very difficult)
SMIL usage is high so it's just being deprecated in blink to get the word out, but not removed just yet. If you're planning to ship both web animations and SMIL, I hope we can get everything you need in web animations before SMIL is finally removed. If you have specific examples you can share, please do post on the smil blink-dev thread.
SMIL support is rough in the old android browser. I suspect using the web animations polyfill will be a safer path than trying to support the SMIL edge cases.
Yeah, it will ship to Chrome users. The effect will be a console warning that SMIL will be removed. You should start seeing this in Canary in the next 1-2 days.
However, as a producer of a professional animation tool I can't wait until Web Animations show up finally someday, but have to address the need expressed by customers that call for open vector animations working on all devices right now - and SMIL was the only one that could have address that. Now, there's nothing until web animations show up, and we can't be guaranteed that the final implementations will be anywhere near promised functionality.
Even just retaining SMIL in its current state would have been much better than just outright dropping it for any kind of continuity. We will obviously provide Web Animations as well, but with the deprecation of SMIL we lost a stop-gap declarative solution for majority of mobile devices, and frankly I don't understand such a haste in dropping it (just sustaining it in Chrome at its current state can't be very difficult)