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CSS Animation in the Apple Safari Browser

By Noah | March 9, 2009

Apple is supporting CSS Animations in Safari for both desktop and the iPhone.  Follow that link using the new Safari 4 Beta and you can try out some of the effects, including <div>s that fade out or spin around when you click them.  The extension properties have names like “-webkit-transition” and so are specific to Webkit (the rendering engine used by Safari), at least for now.  Some commentators think putting animation into CSS is heading in the wrong direction, but if the whole Web is not going to be Flash, then HTML and CSS will need capabilities for building richer interfaces.  Doing it declaratively in CSS seems like a good way to go.

Topics: Web, Internet, Computing | 2 Comments »

2 Responses to “CSS Animation in the Apple Safari Browser”

  1. John Dowdell Says:
    March 9th, 2009 at 4:44 PM

    “If the whole Web is not going to be Flash, then HTML and CSS will need capabilities for building richer interfaces.”

    That seems as logical as saying that if the National Hockey League will not be going all-web, that the HTML5 spec needs to include lacrosse sticks.

    jd/adobe

  2. Noah Says:
    March 10th, 2009 at 9:11 AM

    Hmm. Maybe I didn’t say it as well as I might have. The point I was trying to make is that the Apple animations work points a way toward doing in declarative standards-based markup, UI manipulations that until now have required Flash, Silverlight or Java. Insofar as techniques like this prove attractive, the need to drop into (with apologies to my friends at Adobe and Microsoft) proprietary systems like Flash and Silverlight may be somewhat reduced.

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