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CSS is pretty flexible. What kind of animations would you expect to be difficult to express?

• webmaven 4y ago
  > CSS is pretty flexible. What kind of animations would you expect to be difficult to express? Interpolations of anything beyond basic properties such as size, orientation, opacity, color, stroke, and fill; vector shapes, particle systems, and generative textures come to mind. There are intermediate possibilities. In theory you could "compile" the animation of a skeletal system with inverse kinematics to CSS, but I'm not aware of anyone going to the trouble.
  • infogulch 4y ago
    If you're going all the way to skeletons, kinematics, particle systems, etc maybe you just need a game renderer. Say, Bevy, if you want a rust flavor.
    • webmaven 4y ago
      No need to go that far. If you're just looking for the edge of where the capabilities of CSS animation fails, consider the pseudo-physics of various direct manipulations in touch UIs: eg. the bounce when you swipe to scroll and reach the last item, or swipe down again to refresh, or swipe to fling cards aside left or right, or pinch to zoom past the last zoom level, etc. In some cases you could get a good-enough result by animating from arbitrary (ie. user controlled) starting point to one or more fixed end-states (eg. Three "flick right" animations, one each for flick up and to the right, right, or down and to the right), but at that point you might as well just use an animation library.
      • webmaven 4y ago
        To restate things from a bit more mathematical perspective, interpolating position (even with control over easing etc.) only gets you so far. Ideally you would be able to set and interpolate higher derivatives of position over time (speed, acceleration, etc.) as well, without resorting to JS.