An Introduction to CSS Animations

If you love animation, you’re probably a fan of CSS animations. They’ve been around for a while now, but at this point, it feels like development community has taken the time to perfect the syntax. Since hardware-accelerated animations have become the norm, browsers can handle smooth animation with multiple keyframes without slowing down users’ machines.

The human brain is hardwired for movement, as is well known. People are more inclined to pay attention to moving items than to static ones. As humans, we’re naturally drawn to something that moves and attracts our attention, so why not use this natural human behavior to your advantage with CSS animation?

 

Why CSS Animations Are Exciting And A Lot Better

 

Website interfaces can benefit from the engagement, personality, and engaging user experience that animations can bring. These animations can help show users that things are happening on the site, when a page is loading and how it should function when finished.

CSS animations can be added to any coloring on a website, for example, to an image or a button. 

Adding animation draws the user’s attention to critical areas of a product or message. The animation creates an impact that attracts users to explore further and can make content easier to interact with. 

Hands-on practice is an essential learning experience for all developers. 

CSS animations enable developers to create both simple and complex animations. They are an excellent solution for creating fluid, natural motion between states in an interface. If used correctly, they can enhance the user experience by making it easier for users to understand what’s happening on the screen.

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How to Use CSS Animations

As you create your animations, it’s essential to understand what you can do with the animation property. That’s because you can use this property in many different ways depending on the needs of your application.

One thing that makes CSS animations so powerful is their extensibility and versatility. With CSS, you can control more than just the animation itself. Some properties you can configure include the duration, direction, and the number of times the animation repeats.

To describe the animation, you can either use the animation shorthand property or the animation sub-properties. The animation shorthand property uses a series of “key frames” that control how the animation moves from one state to another over time. The keyframes define each animation stage, from start to finish, including how long each step should last.

The CSS Transitions property is really simple to specify the browser which supports it, as all the versions of all browsers support all the sub-properties. The transition sub-properties have different browser support among the browsers. Some values starting with the “jump” keyword cannot be implemented in Internet Explorer. 

Therefore, after implementing CSS animations to your websites and web apps, you must perform browser compatibility testing to ensure your animations renders correctly in al browsers and OSes. You can leverage cloud testing platform like LambdaTest provides manual and automated cross browser testing on over 3000 browsers and OS combinations. 

Conclusion

With CSS animations you can make elements on the page appear and disappear, move from one position to another, change colors and appearances, trigger events, and much more. However, as with all new skills, mastering CSS animation takes time and practice. Start with simple examples like changing color and position using CSS keyframe animations. As your skills grow, you can create more complex sequences of animations.