Really 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.
Very impressive CSS3 demo: CSS3 Planetarium
51–60 of 62 posts
Re: Very impressive CSS3 demo: CSS3 Planetarium
#52Very cool, but on every planet I wanted to be able to spin it on it's axis. That would be a demo.
Re: Very impressive CSS3 demo: CSS3 Planetarium
#53That 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 loo…
That'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 fun…
The 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.
Re: Very impressive CSS3 demo: CSS3 Planetarium
#54It 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?
The 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.
Re: Very impressive CSS3 demo: CSS3 Planetarium
#55One 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.
This looks like a purposeful action by the page: it calls preventDefault on mousedown events for some reason. :(
Re: Very impressive CSS3 demo: CSS3 Planetarium
#56I 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:...
Yes, once transforms enter CR.
Note, by the way, that right now -moz-transform and -webkit-transform have different syntax, so "consolidation" involves deciding which syntax to standardize on.
Re: Very impressive CSS3 demo: CSS3 Planetarium
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
because 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 withou…
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 This requires me to install a whole browser! For some reason the HN crowd sees installing FF4 as free. Installing a plug-in as nearly the equivalent to jail time, a horrendous chore. Wit…
> Installing a plug-in as nearly the equivalent to jail
> time, a horrendous chore.
That's because that's what it generally has been, in the case of Flash. You may want to read http://blog.zpao.com/post/538816688/how-to-install-flash-on-... if you haven't had that particular "pleasure"...
Re: Very impressive CSS3 demo: CSS3 Planetarium
#58Looks 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.
Bugged me too.
Re: Very impressive CSS3 demo: CSS3 Planetarium
#59Re: Very impressive CSS3 demo: CSS3 Planetarium
#60Developer 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 cont…
Ok, 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.