Re: Units of time in Web Animations [was: Intent to Ship: Element.animate]

(2014/04/17 8:39), Michael Mullany wrote:
> Tab,
>
> I think this is a JavaScript / CSS cultural divide. I have rarely seen
> ms used in CSS questions on StackOverflow or in almost any Codepen
> example. On the other hand, I think JavaScript folks think in ms.

I think you're right. Paul's survey and GitHub search seem to confirm 
this pattern.

My inclination at the moment is to make raw numbers in Web Animations 
represent ms.

I thought we could possibly make the TimingInput dictionary's 'duration' 
member be a union type "(DOMString or double)" but they're not 
distinguishable right?

Suppose we find a way to allow "2s", "2000ms" or 2000 (=milliseconds) 
for "duration", we'd have to apply the same treatment to "delay", 
"endDelay", and "iterationStart". And we'd have to also do the same for 
the Timing interface later and define behavior so that when setting 
animation.timing.duration = "2s" we automatically convert it to 2000 (so 
that whenever you *read* animation.timing.duration you get the same 
thing and didn't have to test its type). And then there's 
AnimationPlayer too. It's possible, but it seems preferable if we can 
just settle on seconds or milliseconds.

I'm not sure how to resolve this but I think Shane has some ideas for 
polling.

> I personally doubt that many CSS folks will adopt Web Animations (it has
> always seemed to me a very complicated spec to understand), so perhaps
> ms makes sense for the audience that will use it.

It's a massive spec. I think we'll end up carving out a subset as level 
1. It would help if we can get tool support to achieve this.

Best regards,

Brian

Received on Thursday, 17 April 2014 00:42:42 UTC