Re: [css3] Proposal

On Dec 7, 2006, at 4:32 PM, David Woolley wrote:

>
>>
>>
>> My apologies if this has been suggested in the past, I did do a quick
>> but hardly exchaustive search.
>>
>> I propose a new property called "animation". For most elements, it
>
> I agree with others that this is behaviour, and doesn't belong in
> CSS.  Some things, like marquee almost certainly only got in because
> marquee was forced into HTML by Microsoft.  (Actually, marquee is bad
> practice, from an accessibility point of view.)
>
>> A value of "reload" would cause the animation to play from frame 1
>
> You need to make the language more general.  Vector animation has a
> time line, but doesn't necessarily have frames.

Vector animation already has facilities with which to deal with this  
sort of thing. I considered a more generalized approach, something  
that would apply to more than an <img> tag, but it seemed pointless.  
For instance, if it applied to an object tag, it might have *some*  
use for embedded video, but it would make little sense in the context  
of a flash applet, which has to be the biggest (by far) use of  
<object> tags. I couldn't reasonably suggest that it apply to these.  
Only image tags, only GIF and possibly MNG (or whoever the winner in  
the animated png wars ends up being).

>
>> This property would be of particular use in designing Flash-like
>> effects, animated button/links and even user.css (where I imagine a
>
> For Flash like effects with W3C technologies, use, what has become,
> W3C's equivalent of Flash, SVG.  (Although, personally, I would prefer
> to have a widely implemented static vector format than a Flash  
> competitor.)

SVG does do alot of what flash does. But to suggest someone open up  
Inkscape, and embed a bunch of raster frames in it, then manually  
write up some SMIL to animated them on hover is overboard.

>
>> great many people might have img { animation:pause !important; } at
>> the top of the file).
>
> Yes, but that also exposes a flaw in that a user cannot force the
> animation to run without stopping or pausing; you need another value.
>

Perhaps. "reload" might not be the correct name, something that  
indicates that it means "play from the beginning", which would be the  
default for all GIFs (and is now, for those who don't have extensions  
blocking them). "pause" is correct, I believe. And perhaps a  
"continue" value, that would allow user css to override a pause,  
without the restart.

Again, I don't think any of these properties are behavior themselves,  
only presentation. Without :hover, they aren't behaviors at all,  
simply presentation for raster animations. In a way, "play from the  
beginning" is already an implied presentation for animated gif's...  
no one suggests that browsers default to not playing them and forcing  
web developers to activate the animation via onload.


John Oyler
john@discrevolt.com