RE: Are CSS animations a done deal?

On Tuesday, March 30, 2010 11:38 AM, Robert O'Callahan wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 7:26 AM, Lars Gunther <gunther@keryx.se>
wrote:


>> A user that runs NoScript will still see CSS animations, is that an
expected result? How long will it take until we see multiple bugs in
Webkits's and Mozilla's bugzillas asking for a way to disable
animations?
	
> The expectation that disabling script disables animations doesn't hold
today: disabling script doesn't disable plugins, or animated images, or
<video>, or SVG animation. Nor should it disable CSS animations. We have
separate control in Gecko for disabling animated images and that could
be  extended to disable CSS animations.

----------------

Presumably an end-user would be able to specify a rule in the user style
sheet such as:

* {

animation-name: none ! important;

}

and be assured that no CSS animation will take place. The only problem
is that this is all-or-nothing, but at least it would block animations.
There would be an issue if a site designer were design their site such
that their site was not usable without the animation; for example, the
animated item has an off-screen start position and never comes on-screen
without the animation, such that the animated information is not
viewable or clickable. (Of course, the end user could disable all CSS,
but if the designer has not tested for this, the content may be a jumble
anyway.) 

It wouldn't necessarily help to give the end-user a way to put in their
user style sheet that animations are to initially display at their end
point rather than their start point, as, depending on the site design,
several animations might wind up at the same point such that they were
all unreadable.

An alternative for the user style sheet would be:

* {
    animation-duration: 0 ! important;
    animation-iteration-count, 1 ! important;
}

Again this is all-or-nothing, and would not allow for the times when an
animation is desired, as for training purposes.

There is the separate issue that the user might want to disable
animations without disabling all JavaScript features of a page. From a
non-Web-savvy user perspective, they might want to disable all
animations without having to know the animation source (CSS, SVG,
JavaScript, Flash, video and GIF) or only run them on the user's
specific request. But that is a user agent issue and not a CSS issue.
The browser needs to recognize that an animation is being attempted and
block it, possibly showing a block icon in the status bar.

Hope this helps, 
Charles Belov 
SFMTA Webmaster

Received on Tuesday, 30 March 2010 20:04:05 UTC