Re: Proposal: will-animate property

Excellent point. My proposal started initially with the values 'auto | yes'
but was later changed.

Currently all major web browser use buffered rendering (layering system)
and I suspect most implementations of will-animate will be at least
initially be a hint to these buffering/layering decision. If a
buffering/layering system knows that a page will-animate, scrolling can
hint to the page that it should buffer outside the visible bounds
(overflow). It is useful to distinguish between scrolling and say opacity
where buffering outside the bounds is not useful. Similarly, I think
hinting what will animate is more implementation agnostics. For example on
mobile there might a highly power efficient fixed function
'bliting/blending' hardware that may be usable to animate scrolling and
opacity but not 3d transform. Although gecko has no such plans, some
implementations may choose to optimize certain animations by caching a non
raster buffer such as a display list or a vector representation.

Thus the proposal was changed to not assume that implementations will
always and forever use the same optimizations for all types of animations
but provide more flexibility for interesting optimizations given available
hardware.

Ideally proposing something similar to SVG buffered-rendering would be nice
but I'm afraid that it's inflexible and tied strongly with a particular
implementation i.e. buffered/layer optimizations. Already the use case to
optimize scrolling differently is very strong as it allows pre-rederending
content.