Animation

There are so many wonderful animations on Cassie Evans’ website that I love, from the way the site title is drawn in to all the effects when you hover/interact with certain things.

Motion Path is a CSS module that allows authors to animate any graphical object along a custom path.

The idea is that when you want to animate an element moving along a path, you previously only had animating translation, position, etc. at your disposal, which wasn’t ideal and only allowed for simple movements. With offset-path you can define a specific path of any shape you want. You then animate it along that path by animating offset-distance, and can choose to rotate it at any point using offset-rotate.

Two years ago, I wrote about prefers-reduced-motion, a media query introduced into Safari 10.1 to help people with vestibular and seizure disorders use the web. The article provided some background about the media query, why it was needed, and how to work with it to avoid creating disability-triggering visual effects.

The article was informed by other people’s excellent work, namely Orde Saunders’ post about user queries, and Val Head’s article on web animation motion sensitivity.

We’re now four months into 2019, and it makes me happy to report that we have support for the feature in all major desktop browsers! Safari was first, with Firefox being a close second. Chrome was a little late to the party, but introduced it as of version 74.

[…]

Reduce isn’t necessarily remove

We may not need to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to using animation. Remember, it’s prefers-reduced-motion, not prefers-no-motion.

[…]

If the meaning of a component is diminished by removing its animation altogether, we could slow down and simplify the component’s animation to the point where the concept can be communicated without potentially being an accessibility trigger.

FLIP is an approach to animations that remaps animating expensive properties, like width, height, left and top to significantly cheaper changes using transforms. It does this by taking two snapshots, one of the element’s First position (F), another of its Last position (L). It then uses a transform to Invert (I) the element’s changes, such that the element appears to still be in the First position. Lastly it Plays (P) the animation forward by removing the transformations applied in the Invert step.

Favicons are actually at their most useful when you’re not active on a tab. Here’s an example:

Imagine you’re backing up photos from your recent summer vacation to a cloud service. While they are uploading, you’ve opened a new tab to gather details about the places you went on vacation to later annotate those photos. One thing led to the other, and now you’re watching Casey Neistat on the seventh tab. But you can’t continue your YouTube marathon without the anxious intervals of checking back on the cloud service page to see if the photos have been uploaded.

It’s this type of situation where we can get creative! What if we could dynamically change the pixels in that favicon and display the upload progress? That’s exactly what we’ll do in this article.

In supported browsers, we can display a loading/progress animation as a favicon with the help of JavaScript, HTML <canvas> and some centuries-old geometry.

While the article primarily deals with a square favicon, the author also provides code for a circular favicon as well.

Splitting creates elements and adds CSS variables to unlock amazing possibilities for animating text, grids, and more!

DoubleDash your CSS

The previously impractical becomes easy with Splitting’s CSS Variables.

Comically Small

A shocking amount of features in a 1.5kb (minified & gzipped) package.

Progressively Enhance

Upgrade websites for modern browsers without breaking IE.