Re: [css3-transitions][css3-animations] Merging transitions & animations

On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 12:50 AM, Lea Verou <leaverou@gmail.com> wrote:
> There seems to be lots of duplicate functionality between those two specs.
> For example, the following properties accomplish almost identical goals:
>
> - transition-duration / animation-duration
> - transition-delay / animation-delay
> - transition-timing-function / animation-timing-function
>
> I was wondering, would the WG be receptive of any proposals to merge these
> two specs into one, or is it too late now? Thought I'd ask before starting
> to brainstorm about it, to avoid working on something that would get
> rejected on grounds of backwards compatibility.

Far too late now, unfortunately.  Transitions and Animations were
among the specs that triggered the prefix crisis recently, because
they've been stable for way too long without unprefixing.

Assuming they were changeable, though, I don't believe they can be
easily merged.  There were several attempts early-on, but they all
suffer from the fact that Transitions are edge-triggered (as you go
between states) while Animations are state-triggered.  These two
models make it quite difficult to pull the syntax together, despite
heavy superficial similarities.

Shane Stephens and I spent some time last year working on a proposal
that extends both T&A into a new model that is a superset of both
specs' functionality, which turned out to be relatively easy and
useful.  We'll present that as a possible direction for the future
once T&A 3 settle down and hit CR.

~TJ

Received on Thursday, 1 March 2012 15:58:27 UTC