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Very impressive CSS3 demo: CSS3 Planetarium
- jarin 16y agoLooks very nice, reminds me of the Elements app for iPad. P.S. I don't know about you guys, but it still bugs me whenever I don't see Pluto.
- checker 16y agoThe article points it out, but the text comes in from different directions depending on whether you're clicking on the planet or scrolling to it from the side. Nice touch.
- stevelosh 16y agoAnd here's what it looks like in IE9: http://twitpic.com/4a3kyw/full http://twitpic.com/4a3kyw/full
- mrspandex 16y agoAlso doesn't work in FF 3.6 or Opera 11...
- leftnode 16y agoThey weren't just released yesterday...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- gkoberger 16y agoIt's a Firefox 4 demo site, so 3.6 isn't supported. It should, however, work on most modern browsers.
- trezor 16y agoIt works in Chrome latest, but it is a bit laggy on what should be powerful and fairly modern laptop (Core i5, Windows Rating 5.9). I guess it's about 10 fps away from what I would consider "sufficiently" smooth, but maybe that goes more along the lines of showing what people now have come to expect of the web rather than being a shortcoming of HTML/JS-solutions. As for this thread, today I learned that MSIE9 is actually released. Time to get updating :)
- rkalla 16y agoI still read this word as "Planeh-arium" in my head. Maybe a bad reference :)
- micheljansen 16y agoIt looks awesome on Chrome, but there is a slight glitch in the shape of a flash that occurs once all animation appears to have finished. Anyone else experiencing this?
- Griever 16y agoOn Chrome Dev 11.0.696.12 and I'm experiencing the same thing. Seems like a minor complaint though as the rest of the site works flawlessly.
- J3L2404 16y agoCrashes Safari on iPad iOS 4.3 [EDIT] On iPad 1.
- gnok 16y agoIt rendered somewhat incorrectly for me, but it was smooth and didn't crash. I'm on Safari on iPad 2 iOS 4.3.
- crowdcs 16y agoI let out a sigh when I saw redundant but understandably necessary function calls to support all browsers. Is there hope in seeing stuff like this consolidated anytime soon? -moz-transform:... -webkit-transform:... -o-transform:... transform:...
- grayrest 16y agoNot really. The prefixes allow vendors to do experimental stuff without creating (as much) of a backwards compatiblity problem before things standardize. If you don't like it, use a preprocessor: * http://sass-lang.com/ http://sass-lang.com/ * http://lesscss.org/ http://lesscss.org/ * http://learnboost.github.com/stylus/ http://learnboost.github.com/stylus/ The last one is the most promising since it can be made to look exactly like standard css, but it's really rough right now.
- nathos 16y agoSass, at least with its default SCSS syntax, is a strict superset of CSS3 so it's a good place to start. Your existing CSS files can be processed by Sass without changes. Combined with some of the great mixins provided with Compass: http://beta.compass-style.org/reference/compass/css3/transform/ http://beta.compass-style.org/reference/compass/css3/transfo..., you can eliminate many of the vendor specific declarations.
- grayrest 16y agoThey all either are or can be strict supersets of CSS3. What separates stylus is that you can write valid, non-superset CSS3 and invoke the appropriate functions/mixins: @import css3 #transparent { opacity: 0.6; } ---- #transparent { opacity: 0.6; -ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=60)"; filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=60); } That's input/output in stylus. This uses an `opacity` mixin defined that's being invoked without the optional parentheses and with the optional colon+semicolon. I have the beginnings of the Compass CSS3 library that's on hold while TJ fixes bugs and adds features to cover edge cases. The eventual goal is the ability to write straight CSS3 and have everything work.
- rheide 16y agoI feel sorry for Pluto :(
- cosgroveb 16y agoIt says Mt. Everest is 8848KM tall... I believe that should be Meters.
- mconnors 16y agoSomething you can make in flash in like 10 minutes- and it works on everything ( not mobile ).
- mconnors 16y agocan't bury that which is true.
- kenjackson 16y agoPretty cheap downvotes you're getting here. Wish I could upvote you more than once.
- richbradshaw 16y agoWe might as well just drop the whole idea of HTML, JS and CSS and just use 3rd party plugins to replace the whole thing. That totally makes sense. Innovation is for idiots.
- kenjackson 16y agoFirst, innovation doesn't only happen in a single application and runtime (the browser). Flash has innovated as much as FF4 has. It's weird that the distribution model for the runtime defines what is innovation and what isn't. A runtime that is distributed as a plugin is inherently not innovative, while one that is a monolithic application is. Go figure. And I think the point of the original poster isn't that we should drop HTML. But rather that this application isn't cool on first principles. You can show this same app to your child as a Flash app and your child should be just as impressed. It's a good work for HTML, but as far as applications distributed by a web server it isn't especially innovative. But we should keep working on HTHML/JS/CSS as it will get better.
- daleharvey 16y agobecause its the distribution that is innovative, its nice being able to draw text and images and move them around and stuff but that doesnt quite fall under my definition of innovative, for html and flash the features of html/css/javascript are not impressive, the fact that you can build increasingly complex application that will work on a common runtime installed on every pc and most people tablets and phones without (barely)any packaging or installation procedures is a modern day miracle
- emehrkay 16y agoMy son has to see this
- splatcollision 16y agoGood stuff. Github page is here: http://github.com/littleworkshop/planetarium http://github.com/littleworkshop/planetarium
- mrspeaker 16y agoThat is really awesome - but one thing (which is just an observation, not a complaint) I've noticed with all the CSS3 super-cool demos like this is that everything is very "linear". All the animation stuff happens in straight lines or repeating patterns (of circles, in the demo) which gives the page a certain feel. I wonder if it's the start of an effect that will eventually be used to carbon-date websites... "Ah look at this specimen - table based layout, and JavaScript littered with variable names beginning with "mm_" from the late Dreamweaver era. Oooh, now look here... completely linear animations... my guess is it's early 2011! And in such condition!"
- Groxx 16y agoThat's interesting... I don't know if it's possible to animate directly on a bezier curve, though that'd be an extremely-useful thing to be able to do. It looks like all the animatable properties just have ease-in / out timing, and go from A to B. Given that, the best you could do is animate each X/Y direction's behavior, creating a new animation at each bezier curve point, and using the bezier form of the timing function to mimic curved paths. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/css/css_transitions https://developer.mozilla.org/en/css/css_transitions and https://developer.mozilla.org/en/css/css_transitions https://developer.mozilla.org/en/css/css_transitions
- bzbarsky 16y agoThe timing function can be an arbitrary cubic bezier; some common ones like ease-in/out and so forth have dedicated keywords. You should be able to get arbitrary bezier paths if you pick your x and y timing beziers carefully, I'd think... But it does take some thinking.
- arnorhs 16y agoNot all the transitions are linear. In the cases where they are, it's obviously a design choice. It might be that because they're moving fast that you perceive it that way. But most of the animations have easing. Ease in and out on almost all the animation styles. http://mozillademos.org/demos/planetarium/css/style.css http://mozillademos.org/demos/planetarium/css/style.css
- ch0wn 16y agoIt works perfectly fine in Chrome, but runs very sluggish compared to FF4. Does anyone know which particular part is so much faster in Firefox?
- robertk 16y agoApparently both Earth and Mercury are the densest planets in the solar system...
- baddox 16y agoWhile that's certainly possible (if they had the same density and no planet was more dense), it's more likely a copy and paste error.
- InclinedPlane 16y agoEarth has a higher density than Mercury (5.52 vs 5.43 g/cm^3).
- nborgo 16y agoMoving the left and right arrows with the cursor is a great idea, especially since they don't move until you get close. It might be nicer if they would animate to the position when you first move the cursor over, though. It's kind of jumpy as is. That pattern just might catch on.
- syaz1 16y agoThere's a bug though. If you click on first/last planet then the arrow will not appear at all. Naturally you expect right arrow when clicking the first planet. Vice versa.
- franck 16y agoDeveloper here. We are glad that many of you found our demo interesting. The point was to explore how we could apply some new browser features to present educational content in an interactive/immersive way. Sorry about Pluto fans – we were also sad not to include it. We should have put it as an easter egg! Thanks to people who reported typo/content errors. We cannot fix them right now though – because we have no control over Mozilla's site. We'll push an update when we get the chance.
- isleyaardvark 16y agoOk, can I gripe about the text that says this about Saturn: "Despite its size (9.4 Earths)..."? While the diameter is 9.4 times that of Earth, the size of Saturn is way larger than 9 individual Earths. Volume-wise you could fit 764 Earths inside Saturn, and that would be a more appropriate metric. The weird hexagon storm on Saturn alone is the size of 4 Earths.
- estel 16y agoIt does seem a bit odd that all three major browser vendors are able to release interesting web-apps that only run at full-speed in their own browsers. Do they intentionally exploit some exclusive feature to show the other browsers up?
- franck 16y agoThere was not any attempt to make it run faster in Firefox 4. The goal is to showcase the Web as a platform and its possibilities. There is clearly no point in making it run well only in one browser. Besides, we developed this demo on OSX, where performance is comparable among all three supported browsers.
- bzbarsky 16y agoThe ordering is sometimes the other way. You write the stuff you think is interesting, discover that you're not as fast as you'd like on it, fix whatever performance bugs you find. Though in this case the demo was actually written after Firefox 4 development was frozen. So the fact that it's particularly fast in Firefox on Windows just has to do with hardware acceleration, nothing else.
- kpozin 16y agoWorks very well in Chrome 10.0 beta, barely runs in Firefox 4 RC1 on the same machine. Oh, the irony.
- sho_hn 16y agoOne thing I notice is that I can't select most of the text. I'd like HTML sites to do better than Flash in this regard -- conformance to established HTML behavior is supposed to be an advantage.
- bzbarsky 16y agoThis looks like a purposeful action by the page: it calls preventDefault on mousedown events for some reason. :(
- pluto 16y agoHmpfh.
- sorbus 16y agoAh, novelty accounts. Could we please keep those to reddit, if you don't mind?
- kevingadd 16y agoWorks perfectly in the latest mobile build of firefox (albeit slowly), which is a pleasant surprise - I expected it not to. Alas, for some reason the stock android browser can't even finish loading it.
- necolas 16y agoReally impressive, but it's a shame that this is being labelled "CSS3" or "HTML5" when clearly it relies on a lot of JavaScript. It's a great example of weaving several front-end technologies together...and there should be nothing wrong with saying so.
- duck 16y agoVery cool, but on every planet I wanted to be able to spin it on it's axis. That would be a demo.