Get our Newsletter!Today I got an email from my boss who is a big fan of all things Apple. Apparently, the WebKit community is working on a number of things for open-source browsers… I’ll be honest and say I don’t know much about them because I don’t really follow their work.
However, my boss pointed our a recent blog post from their team regarding CSS animations. After taking a look, here are my thoughts on the idea.
- The concept of CSS animation is taking the web browsers back to the age of Netscape vs. IE – where things like <blink> and <marquee> HTML tags weren’t consistently supported by all browsers. The result of the aforementioned battle was that these visual elements were dropped from the HTML catalog, a decision with which I completely agree. Working on my Windows laptop, the CSS animations do not work in any browser – even Safari.
- Although I do agree that CSS is inherently visual, I don’t think that visual effects should be handled by CSS. With platforms like Flash, Silverlight and JavaScript (which manipulates the CSS) already stable and supported by all browsers (not to mention animated GIF images and online video), CSS has no reason to extend its purpose: to define visual layout.
- CSS animation also begins to blur the lines between graphic design and web design/development – which, although similar and complimentary, are in fact different disciplines.
I honestly hope that Apple doesn’t integrate this idea into any major releases for either their desktop or mobile browsers. I see no need for it other than the academic pursuit of “Can I do this?”
Like I said, I don’t pretend to follow or know much about the folks at WebKit. So, I’d love to hear some more opinions on the subject.
