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Look Mom, No Javascript! CSS Animation Comes to WebKit

Sunday, February 8th, 2009
Filed under: Designers — Tags: , , , , , — Jt Hollister

WebKit, the rendering engine that has brought CSS3's explicit animation to the web for the first time!

WebKit, the rendering engine that has brought CSS3's explicit animation to the web for the first time!

Today we as web designers and developers get a rare chance to look into the future. The latest nightly build of Webkit (the rendering engine for browsers Apple Safari and Google Chrome) includes some new support for CSS3. Specifically, explicit animations using CSS. Up until now, developers have either had to rely on Flash and all its drawbacks, or bite the bullet and write out a long piece of JavaScript just to get a box to slide in elegantly. JQuery alleviated the problem somewhat, but nothing compares to the visual approach of writing a CSS document.

CSS animation will enable developers to spend much less time on animation which, to the end user, may seem trivial. And it will do so with cleaner, simpler, more robust code that will load significantly faster and run smoother for the end user. Read on to see a preview of how it works, and when you can expect to be able to use this on an actual web page.

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