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SMIL on?

Well, it turns out that SVG's built-in animation features were never deprecated as planned. Sure, CSS and JavaScript are more than capable of carrying the load, but it's good to know that SMIL is not dead in the water as previously thought, and is actually well-supported.

GG

Geoff GrahamCSS-Tricks

·April 2, 2025·Articles

SVG SMIL Isn’t Dead After All

A recent conversation about SVG animations raised a familiar question: is SMIL a dead end? That assumption has been floating around for years, and for good reason.

Back in 2017, Sarah Drasner noted that SMIL support was fading in WebKit and had never existed—and likely never would—in Microsoft’s IE or Edge browsers. Chrome had also published an intent to deprecate SMIL, pointing to work in other browsers to support SVG animations via CSS. MDN even linked to that same deprecation thread in its SMIL documentation.

But things have shifted. Chrome never actually followed through with the deprecation, according to a reply in the original Blink thread dated 2023. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Edge adopted the Chromium engine, making it effectively a Chrome clone. And as of now, Caniuse reports full SMIL support in WebKit browsers.

That said, SMIL isn’t exactly thriving either. Robust CSS and JavaScript alternatives remain strong options for SVG animation. But calling SMIL dead in the water would be a stretch.