I was pleasantly surprised by all the good feedback I got for Animator.js since Ajaxian linked to the article.

The most requested feature was “Can I port it to MochiKit/jQuery/Dojo/mootools”. Which got me thinking – Animator.js is built on Prototype because I didn’t want to rewrite code for function delegation and element manipulation myself, but it doesn’t use any of Prototype’s advanced functionality. I could remove the dependency on prototype quite easily and then it would work with any toolkit. I estimate this would add about 1K to the file size.

Having a class that can be used in any toolkit would be much better than a number of independently maintained forks.

Two questions:

  1. What changes should I make to ensure that it can plug in to your favourite toolkit?
  2. If someone can make a product usable for more people by re-implementing basic functionality again, is it worth it? Or is the world standardising on Prototype to do all that for them?

I’ll be making another release in a couple of weeks so let me know your thoughts, and any other feature requests.