It would be nice to be able to animate the transition between pages if we want to on the web without resorting to hacks or full-blown architecture choices to achieve it.
Amen, Chris, amen!
The danger here is that you might pick a single-page app just for this ability, which is what I mean by having to buy into a site architecture just to achieve this.
Browsers give you a ton of stuff for free, built right in, out-of-the-box. SPAs break all that, and force you to recreate it yourself with JavaScript. Most developers do it wrong, and for the ones who do it right, it results in a ton of extra code to recreate features the browser already gave you for free.
This looks like a handy library for managing page transitions on sites that are not single page apps.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but I really think that this handles 80% of the justification for using a single page app architecture.
Hallelujah! We’re finally getting our two wishes for CSS animations and transitions:
- Animating to and from
display: none;for the sake of enter/exit animations.- Animating to and from the intrinsic size of an element (such as
height: auto;).
I’m very excited about this proposal for animating transitions between web pages!
I’m less excited about doing it for single page apps, but I get why it’s the simplest place to start.
This builds on Jake’s earlier proposal which I always thought was excellent and much needed. I’m not the only one. Chris agrees.
I honestly think if browsers implemented this, 80% of client-rendered Single Page Apps could be done as regular good ol’-fashioned websites.
Having to reimplement navigation for a simple transition is a bit much, often leading developers to use large frameworks where they could otherwise be avoided. This proposal provides a low-level way to create transitions while maintaining regular browser navigation.
Technically, websites can do just about anything that native apps can do. And yet the actual experience of using the web on mobile is worse than ever.
A redesign with modern CSS.
It’s kind of ridiculous that this functionality doesn’t exist yet.
A genuinely inspiring event.
Here’s Clearleft’s approach to browser support. You can use it too (it’s CC-licensed).