Hallelujah! We’re finally getting our two wishes for CSS animations and transitions:
- Animating to and from
display: none;for the sake of enter/exit animations.- Animating to and from the intrinsic size of an element (such as
height: auto;).
Finally! View transitions for multi-page apps (AKA websites) will be landing in Chrome soon—here’s hoping other browsers follow suit. Mozilla are up for it. Apple are, as usual, silent on their intentions.
Nice to see a blog post of mine referenced to show that this is a highly-requested feature. Blogging gets results, folks!
With classes, we can send CSS static values but with custom properties we can send dynamic ones, which is a major shift in the way we can style state. This is something that has been true for some time—and is extremely well supported—but sometimes it takes solving a small real-world problem to make you appreciate the value of it.
I think we still haven’t come to fully appreciate the superpower of custom properties: dynamic values that are shared between CSS and JavaScript.
The fascinating pre-history of steam power, illustrated with interactive widgets.
This is a very handy tip if you’re adding view transitions to your website!
Some great ideas for view transitionts in here! Also:
If you look at any of the examples on a browser that does not support them, the pages still function just fine. The transitions are an extra that’s layered on top if and when your browser supports them. Another concrete example of progressive enhancement in practice.
Write meaningful HTML that communicates the structure of your document before any style or additional interactivity has loaded. Write CSS carefully, reason your methodology and stick to it, and feel empowered to skip frameworks. When it comes time to write JavaScript, write not too much, make sure you know what it all does, and above all, make sure the website works without it.
The whole article is great, and really charmingly written, with some golden nuggets embedded within, like:
- You’ll find that spending more time getting HTML right reveals or even anticipates and evades accessibility issues. It’s just easier to write accessible code if it’s got semantic foundations.
- In my experience, you will almost always spend more time overriding frameworks or compromising your design to fit the opinions of a framework.
- Always style from the absolute smallest screen your content will be rendered on first, and use
@media (min-width)queries to break to layouts that allow for more real estate as it becomes available.- If your site doesn’t work without JavaScript, your site doesn’t work.
- Always progressively enhance your apps, especially when you’re fucking with something as browser-critical as page routing.
This is why prefers-reduced-motion matters.
This is such a great clear explanation from Lynn on how to add some tasteful parallax depth to scrolling pages.
I can see myself almost certainly needing to use this clever technique at some point so I’m going to squirrel it away now for future me.
I like the split-screen animated format for explaining this topic.
I’m very excited about this proposal for animating transitions between web pages!
I’m less excited about doing it for single page apps, but I get why it’s the simplest place to start.
This builds on Jake’s earlier proposal which I always thought was excellent and much needed. I’m not the only one. Chris agrees.
I think Bruce is onto something here:
It seems to me that browsers could do more to protect their users. Browsers are, after all, user agents that protect the visitor from pop-ups, malicious sites, autoplaying videos and other denizens of the underworld. They should also protect users against nausea and migraines, regardless of whether the developer thought to (or had the tools available to).
So, I propose that browsers should never respect
scroll-behavior: smooth;if a user prefers reduced motion, regardless of whether a developer has set the media query.
A case study with equal emphasis on animation and performance.
It would be nice to be able to animate the transition between pages if we want to on the web without resorting to hacks or full-blown architecture choices to achieve it.
Amen, Chris, amen!
The danger here is that you might pick a single-page app just for this ability, which is what I mean by having to buy into a site architecture just to achieve this.
This is how you write up a technique! Cassie takes an SVG pattern she used on the Clearleft “services” page and explains it in step-by-step detail, complete with explanatory animated diagrams.
Given the widespread browser support for prefers-reduced-motion now, this approach makes a lot of sense.
This is a really nice introduction to CSS transitions with interactive demos you can tinker with.
Cassie’s enthusiasm for fun and interesting SVG animation shines through in her writing!
Cassie’s redesign is gorgeous—so much attention to detail! (And performant too)