HOT Animation!
If you think animation is just more CSS pixie dust to add sparkle to your designs, come along to this session and see Dmitry demo its even more awesome powers, and show how they are within the reach of even us mere mortals.
(“next up is Dmitry, if you don’t know his surname you haven’t been paying attention”)
What is animation for? It’s for clarity, not to have fun. Make it easier for people to understand what the heck is going on. If you move things around with no animation or transition it’s hard to follow what’s going on. Sometimes the initial and final states look the same; so you might not even know something changed.
So, animation is important.
What is animation on the web? Usually we have a value; change it over a duration; and if we’re luck we have easing; extra lucky we have iterations; and delay. That’s the anatomy of web animation. That sucks! It’s very primitive! But nobody complains.
Easing – we just have cubic-bezier. This is not enough! Why are you not complaining about this stuff? I’m not happy with this stuff!
Discrete animation – common example is a spinner – this is not as easy as it should be.
Reusing animation – you can’t do it! You have to make multiple animations even if the result is the same. But then you can’t apply multiple animations to one element.
Getting and setting animation status – you can’t do that!
Want custom animation! I want to be able to write things that maybe my browser doesn’t know about. Would prefer if the browser just did it…
There is hope! Web Animations 1.0 is an emerging web standard from the W3C. Only problem is it could be done wrong, of course.
Dmitry is one of the editors of the spec so he is trying to put his money where his mouth is.
So why is he talking to us? We should be complaining about the state of animation!
“Being happy and smiling all the time is not productive! We should be productively unhappy!”
If we don’t complain it means you’re happy; if you’re happy nothing needs to change; then progress won’t happen. Developers are too happy to talk about how good things are – but only seem to complain about javascript for some reasons… (“I think it’s perfect.”)
Be productively unhappy, change the world.
