Re: requestAnimationFrame time and DOMHighResTimestamp

Maybe a flag on the requestAnimationFrame function would be useful for
feature-detection?

window.requestAnimationFrame.highResTimestamp => true

Yehuda Katz
(ph) 718.877.1325


On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 11:04 AM, Nat Duca <nduca@chromium.org> wrote:

> A while back, JamesR and I volunteered to try out changing
> requestAnimationFrame's "time" argument to use DOMHighResTimestamp
> instead of DOMTimeStamp. I think a report on our initial findings is
> in order :)
>
> The bug where we did this work was here:
> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77229
>
> We ended up having to revert this patch after about a week due to
> branch point pressures. Here's what was broken when "the real world"
> interefered:
>
> * Closure library animation broke (thus lots of Google properties broke)
> * Erik's "robust polyfill"
> (
> http://my.opera.com/emoller/blog/2011/12/20/requestanimationframe-for-smart-er-animating
> ,
> reposted here,
> http://paulirish.com/2011/requestanimationframe-for-smart-animating/).
> We're not clear how widely used this snippet is.
>
> The key issue that crops is animation libraries that use this design
> pattern:
>
> function MyAnimation(duration) {
>   this.startTime = Date.now();
>   this.duration = duration;
>   requestAnimFrame(this.tick.bind(this));
> }
> MyAnimation.prototype.tick = function(time) {
>   if (time > now) {
>     this.dispatchEvent("ended");
>     return;
>   }
>    ...
>  requestAnimFrame(this.tick.bind(this));
> }
>
> An edit to fix this is pretty easy... switch the startTime to use
> window.performance.now().
>
> The problem is that its not possible to polyfill: there's no way to
> "feature detect" whether the browser is passing HighRes time to you
> versus DOMTimeStamp. They're both Number.
>
> I dont have a strong opinion on what to do next. We've talked
> informally about 2nd-argument, or putting something on window to help
> write polyfills for this case. If we had a polyfill, we might be able
> to try again --- even though a few things broke, given a good
> polyfill, the number of raf-based animation systems seemed
> small-enough to be still-within the scope of an outreach effort.
>
> What do folks here think?
>
>
> - Nat
>
>