[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.