Day: June 22, 2011

One of Paddy Johnson's commenters found what he believes is a major factual inaccuracy in my post about Google's Martha Graham animation--so major that he spammed her blog with comments loudly and repeatedly claiming that I was guilty of "intellectual dishonesty." (Somewhat like makers of signs on American highways telling you that a tourist attraction is coming up--keep reading folks, the truth is just four comments ahead... three comments...)

The gist of his argument is that, (i) with no prior knowledge of CSS or JavaScript, he "fully understands" how to create CSS animations "after less than five minutes' reading" (although he never tested this knowledge by making or posting an animation) and that therefore (ii) I've created a false binary between easy to make GIFs and hard to make CSS animations. It's great that authoring tools for non-GIF animations are starting to appear, but would they enable you to create the "Martha Graham dance"? Many have suggested otherwise. As one commenter noted on AFC, "Google likes to show off what their programmers can do with simple code." Another opined that "GIFs are files that are definitely easier to understand and handle than Google's scripting." A computer science-educated artist who I emailed before putting up my Martha Graham post described Google's animation as "a brittle coupling of assets and dependent on the state of the HTML document embedding it" and therefore a probable "preservation nightmare" (as compared to GIFs). Much had been written on the wider Internet about How Google Did It. All of which is to suggest that "anyone" couldn't have done it.