A Typewriter, but with no HTML, CSS, or JS?!

#codepen #svg #html

Apparently a battle of sorts has erupted amongst devs clamoring for the title of Best Typewriter Animator Person.

@alvaromontoro started with a Typewriter effect in CSS
@afif then gave us A scalable CSS only Typewriter Effect
@inhuofficial has promised us an HTML-only typewriter
And @alvaromontoro came back with an Animated no-element typewriter

In the classic spirit of one-uppery that has arisen, it was only a matter of time before someone, somewhere took on the most legendary of tasks: to create a typewriter animation for the web without using anything. No Javascript. No CSS. Not even HTML.

Behold, the power of Scalable Vector Graphics.

Ok but actually don't use this if you want a typewriter animation! It's got browser compatibility and accessibility issues, but at least it's a cute experiment.

How it works

The SVG spec has something called Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) which allows animations to be defined in the XML document directly.

For example, consider the animate tag. When made a child of some shape like rect, you can choose what attribute to animate over time and specify the way in which it changes.

So for example, the text cursor is given a simple blink animation just by adjusting the width of a rectangle between 0 and 1, and doing it discretely so it blinks:

<rect fill="black" x="0" y="4" width="1" height="12">
  <animate
    attributeName="width"
    calcMode="discrete"
    values="1; 0"
    dur="1s"
    repeatCount="indefinite" />
</rect>

This is the first time I've ever used SMIL, so almost certainly someone smarter than me can find a better way than adjusting an overlaying white rectangle!

Top comments (12)

Alvaro Montoro • Aug 29 '21

Nice 🙂

Alvaro Montoro • Aug 29 '21

Wait... No multiline? I may need to revoke the "nice" comment 😋

But seriously, this looks really nice. Good entry. And welcome to the "fight."

Timothy Foster • Aug 29 '21

Lol, no multiline, hardcoded magic numbers, and the background has to be white! Truly the height of flexible code 😆

Temani Afif • Aug 29 '21 • Edited

oh, a new warrior!

PS: add some tags to your post to get some visibility (the #webdev and even #html can fit, also #codepen and the #SVG of course)

Timothy Foster • Aug 29 '21

Thanks! Totally forgot to do that ^^'

Bernd Wechner • Aug 30 '21

Nice. I like.

But I think it a tad extreme to claim no HTML. I mean the svg tag is... er, HTML, not?

HS • Sep 1 '21

It's Schrödinger's tag. It's HTML and it's not. It's markup not HTML but HTML "supports" it. So if browser supports it while rendering it's HTML. But not really. I think you see how this could be series of blog posts by itself.

Timothy Foster • Aug 30 '21

Technically, there's a clause in the HTML spec for the svg element; but, you could also save this as a literal *.svg file and load it up in a browser, hence HTML isn't necessary!

Or a different way of putting it, I technically used HTML to present it in this post, but only used features provided by the SVG specification 😊