Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-images] Disabling image animation (#1615)

I want to come back to this problem, in light of the new proposal (https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11554), because I think there is a more pointed solution than the general solution of supporting images in `<video>` tags, and I wanted to offer some rationale:

For some developers, they don't want to switch from `<img>` to `<video>` and inherit the complexity that brings. Some developers also don't want to alter their user's markup which would be surprising for the user - to see their `<img>` code being transformed into a `<video>`. In addition altering such markup could be very complex and many developers are likely using off-the-shelf libraries for sanitizing their HTML, which doesn't offer the facility to _alter_ markup (e.g. switching an `<img>` to a `<video>`). Some sites, for example GitHub (which recently just hit 1 billion repos), will have such a large corpus of pre-existing content that transforming all of it might be too much of an undertaking. All this to say: _retaining existing markup_ is an important requirement for solving this problem.

For such sites with user generated content they might not want all images to not play back (for example images as part of the product design might be animated, e.g. https://github.com/home), these animations might be more acceptable to users vs whatever gif is inside of a comment. So _selectivity_ is an important requirement for solving this problem.

Both of these seem to make this a hole for a CSS shaped peg. Having a CSS property that disables the playback until it is clicked is something that can precisely solve these use cases, and provides an easy opt in for such sites. Sites can, with a few lines of CSS, make a measurable improvement to the accessibility of their product.

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Received on Thursday, 4 September 2025 09:06:07 UTC