Re: [css3-animations] animate display, other non-animatable properties

On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 12:14 AM, François REMY
<fremycompany_pub@yahoo.fr> wrote:
> Oh dear, I just noticed you can’t use the 'display' property at all in
> animations; I was really thinking you could and that just the interpolation
> process was going to be ignored.
>
> Therefore, I propose to support ‘animations’ on *any property*; the behavior
> of an animation of an non-animatable property would be to switch the used
> value as soon as the halfway to the next keyframe is reached (i.e. the
> initial value would be mapped to -1, the final one to +1; the used value
> would be the initial one for strictly negative numbers, and the final one
> for positive numbers (0 included)).
>
> This is (strangely) not what has been done for 'visibility' but I feel this
> is what most authors will expect for other properties; we could probably
> extend the definition used for 'visibility' to 'display' from and to 'none'
> because it can make sense for those properties to keep the element visible
> as long as possible. Also, if a way to animate the property is added later
> one, the behavior will probably match more closely the change halfway than a
> change when the next frame is reached only.
>
> This is a breaking change from the current implementations, whose some
> already shipped unprefixed, but this should not be a problem because current
> browser properly ignore those declarations, just like they ignore unknown
> properties.

The fact that they currently ignore them actually means that we
probably can't change our behavior - people may have left properties
in their animations and are now accidentally depending on them not
working.

However, the use-case is very valid.  I think we should be able to
solve this with a new timing function that works for all properties
(and define that the others only work for "animatable" values) -
discrete(<percentage>).  The percentage indicates at what point in the
time it should flip from the start value to the end value.

~TJ

Received on Wednesday, 1 August 2012 07:23:55 UTC