Re: [css3-transitions] Why isn't the display property animatable?

On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 11:01 AM, Andy Earnshaw <andyearnshaw@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not suggesting that other properties be affected by animating `display`,
> per se, just that the appearance be animated in a similar manner to that of
> the `height` or `width` property transition (nowhere did I mention
> `opacity`, I guess you got that from jQuery). What I'm suggesting is a
> simple transition from one value to another, either the rendered box's
> physical height or width. It isn't any more complex than animating the
> `width` or `height` properties themselves; as far as I can tell, the only
> complexities would occur when either the from or to value isn't `none` ― for
> which, I'm suggesting we do not animate if there are technical problems with
> doing so.
>
> Basically, I'm pretty much trying to say that at least some form of
> animation on the `display` property would be a great asset to web developers
> and, after thinking a great deal about it, the only type of animation that
> makes sense to me is incremental adjustments to the rendering box's height
> or width. If that seems odd to you, perhaps you have an idea of how
> `display` could be animated in a more appropriate manner? Like I said
> before, some box types cannot be animated as simply as most web developers
> would like and animating the `display` property would fix this.

"Just changing the rendered width/height" isn't so simple,
unfortunately.  How does that interact with another animation
animating width or height explicitly, for example?

This is why, so far, all the animatable property types are animated
solely by doing a linear interpolation of some numbers in the
representation.  That's easy to understand and self-contained.

As for me thinking it odd, if we assume that all the difficulties with
a property transition affecting other properties have been ironed out,
then I merely think it odd to choose one particular method of
animating 'display' as the "correct" default version when there are
several equally-valid ways to do that.  That is why I referred to
jQuery - they provide three different versions in the core library,
all of which I've used at some point in my webdev experience.  If we
were to do this kind of thing, we should do it in a way that's
extensible, so authors can choose which kind of effect they want for
fading something in/out, and even create their own.

~TJ

Received on Monday, 28 May 2012 20:02:23 UTC