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This is a really good point.

It PAINS me that when somebody wants to upload a friggin' cartoon on the internet they have to render it out to 100X the native size and introduce compression artifacts. We were more sophisticated than this in 1999!




I mean, it's kind of crazy to think about, but forget distribution and even games entirely for a sec. What is the current standard for making vector animations, just in general?

There isn't one. Why? Flash clearly showed that people like to make animations with vector art. It compresses well, you can do nice things with scaling. And independent of everything else, there just isn't a clear best tool for that today.

I honestly feel like some of this comes down to, somebody needs to look at Flash and say, "hey, having nested timelines inside of symbols that can be edited on the fly is a really good idea, and maybe some program somewhere should do that." I don't understand why that hasn't happened anywhere.


This is the real tragedy. Games have clearly found a way to persist but animation is out in the cold and there's no good reason for it.


We have a good standard, SVG. It's just that the implementation has been slow and buggy, and the animation stuff may never be implemented.




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