[pupppet]

This is what happens when there isn't an adult in the room to reign things in, you get project overreach. SVGs should never have supported scripting. You want scripting in SVGs, fine, make it a different file format.

I can't imagine the cumulative number of man hours wasted on this problem when the vast majority of users were just looking for a way to make their logos look sharp.

[thrance]

Or you can literally just manipulate your SVG through the DOM in an external JS script... I still have no idea what the original motivation behind scripts in SVGs was.

[bobthepanda]

I imagine it may have been attractive to those who liked Flash.

[pbhjpbhj]

I think it may have been the other way (ie attractive to those who didn't like flash) - SVG was seen as a potential flash replacement?

[kilna]

> SVG was seen as a potential flash replacement?

Yes, that was a large part of the thrust back in the day. Even if it wasn't officially a goal of the SVG working group, there was a lack of an open standards-based alternative to what Flash was able to do, and the developers of the SVG standard saw that adding animation/tweening wouldn't take much given what browsers were already becoming capable of.

[bobthepanda]

a little bit of a, a little bit of b. to displace flash if you don't like it, SVG has to have flash-like features to appeal to those who do use it and steal them away.

[oldsecondhand]

OG actionscript was very similar to Javascript. It only started to diverge when type hints were introduced.

[gsnedders]

AS2 was mostly following the direction of ES4 — so it wouldn’t have diverged if it hadn’t been abandoned.

[zarzavat]

While SVG is a web technology, for the longest time you had to install SVG support as a browser plug-in. I remember installing Adobe SVG viewer around 2000. It was used for interactive visualizations.

I'm don't remember precisely but I don't think you could script it from the DOM, I don't see how that could work if it's a plugin.

[NL807]

> SVGs should never have supported scripting.

I would even go further: HTML should never have supported scripting.

[throwawayqqq11]

... or third party requests. Scratch the H in HTML and internet tracking would have never happened.

[philipallstar]

You could track people without links. You just couldn't go to other places without links.