Editing Incubator escapee wiki:Help desk/Archive 1 (section)

== animation?? ==

I have a number of additions to pages planned (e.g. related to mobility managment and other things related to movement and time in wireless networks) which cry out desperately for simple animation.  What is the current advice for that?  Preferably someting better than animated GIF..  Which format, what application to use to write them etc.  I have a RedHat system so something that works there is needed.  [[Open standards]] / [[Free Software]] pls.[[User:Mozzerati|Mozzerati]] 19:55, 2004 May 27 (UTC)

: I'm afraid animated GIF is it.  The "correct" solution will be (one day) either [[SVG]] or [[MNG]], but support for these even in the latest browsers is next to zero.  And we ''really'' want to support older browsers and those with alternate access devices like cellphones, PDAs, and the users of accessibility browsers like screen readers or braille displays.  Also, one day there (hopefully) will be a paper version of wikipedia - so while animations are welcome, they should always be "expendable" - i.e. the article should still read and work fine even without the animation.  Some folks work around the problem with clever design - see [[Circlestrafing]], others with multiple frames of animation shown (e.g. [[Four-stroke cycle]]).  I can think of only one article that has, and really ''needs'', animation - [[Roundabout intersection]]. -- [[User:Finlay McWalter|Finlay McWalter]] | [[User talk:Finlay McWalter | Talk]] 20:08, 27 May 2004 (UTC)

::Oh, I note that [[Four-stroke cycle]] also has links to MPEGs too (I think they're made with [[Blender]]). -- [[User:Finlay McWalter|Finlay McWalter]] | [[User talk:Finlay McWalter | Talk]] 20:23, 27 May 2004 (UTC)

hmm.. the problem I'm dealing with is that mobility management really ''needs'' movement for good presentation (since that's what it's about).. I think I'm going to try in SVG then someone can convert to GIF later if that's really needed.  It would at least encourage people to get SVG capabilities :-) [[User:Mozzerati|Mozzerati]] 19:30, 2004 May 28 (UTC)

: Okay.  Please drop me a note when you've gained some experience with whatever tool you decide upon, as I'm keen to do some SVG myself.  I imagine most mature SVG tools will convert to animated GIF. -- [[User:Finlay McWalter|Finlay McWalter]] | [[User talk:Finlay McWalter | Talk]] 19:36, 28 May 2004 (UTC)

: Hmm.  On looking around further, SVG may not work right now.  See the discussion at: [[m:SVG image support]].  You probably don't want to spend too much effort making your SVGS before confirming that they work ok on wikipedia. -- [[User:Finlay McWalter|Finlay McWalter]] | [[User talk:Finlay McWalter | Talk]] 21:25, 28 May 2004 (UTC)