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Comment by thrance

17 hours ago

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.

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.

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

  • 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?

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

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