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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.