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Path menu in pure CSS3

lab.victorcoulon.fr

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Re: Path menu in pure CSS3

#11

Post by moe »

steve8918 wrote: post #7

Obviously Path has done something great in terms of coming up with a beautiful, innovative menu design. Do people here think that Path should have been granted some type of protection so that others couldn't copy its look and feel so quickly, or it is okay that competitors have come out almost immediately? I am just asking the question, I'm not sure how I feel about the issue. I'm against software patents, but I coul…

understand if Path's GUI designers are pissed that people are copying them so quickly, and making them lose their advantage.

Repeat after me: The arrangement of a popup-menu is not patent-worthy.

Re: Path menu in pure CSS3

#12

Post by alex_h »

Can someone enlighten me as to why "pure CSS" is seen as the pinnacle of web design? It seems that for problems involving a computational element like this, Javascript would be much more concise and readable. Having said that, it is beautifully done.

Re: Path menu in pure CSS3

#13

Post by aiscott »

alex_h wrote: post #12

Can someone enlighten me as to why "pure CSS" is seen as the pinnacle of web design? It seems that for problems involving a computational element like this, Javascript would be much more concise and readable. Having said that, it is beautifully done.

People like to push a technology as far as they can. It's part of the satisfaction of mastering a tech that you think of ways to push it beyond what is considered the comfort zone of that tech.

There might be some inherent value of avoiding javascript, but I think this is just a hack for the satisfaction of being able to do it.

Re: Path menu in pure CSS3

#14

Post by AndyJPartridge »

steve8918 wrote: post #7

Obviously Path has done something great in terms of coming up with a beautiful, innovative menu design. Do people here think that Path should have been granted some type of protection so that others couldn't copy its look and feel so quickly, or it is okay that competitors have come out almost immediately? I am just asking the question, I'm not sure how I feel about the issue. I'm against software patents, but I coul…

I saw a very similar idea a while back here, and bookmarked it.

http://playground.mobily.pl/jquery/mobily-blocks/demo.html

It's a short breath away from what Path have done.

I love the aesthetics of both, I have to say. Great work.

Re: Path menu in pure CSS3

#15

Post by 9oliYQjP »

alex_h wrote: post #12

Can someone enlighten me as to why "pure CSS" is seen as the pinnacle of web design? It seems that for problems involving a computational element like this, Javascript would be much more concise and readable. Having said that, it is beautifully done.

I would say that from 2006 and earlier, designers sought to go "pure CSS" primarily because of the possibility of javascript being disabled on the client. Especially for search engine crawlers at the time, this would be a bad thing.

Things have changed and more and more people run with javascript enabled, and more and more website stakeholders are willing to put up with things being broken for users who don't have it enabled. I know that's a contentious statement, but it's true. If Google Analytics and ads aren't being pushed down to you because javascript is disabled, most site owners are willing to put up with the experience being broken for you too. I'll sidestep the debate of graceful degradation.

Now however, there are performance reasons for going "pure CSS". A lot of CSS transforms and animations are hardware accelerated and/or just animate more fluidly than they would if they were animated via javascript. Javascript is single threaded, and when a webpage is doing a ton of varied activities, it's hard to ensure fluid animation when the only tools at your disposal for drawing frames are pretty crude methods like setTimeout.

Re: Path menu in pure CSS3

#16

Post by [deleted] »

alex_h wrote: post #12

Can someone enlighten me as to why "pure CSS" is seen as the pinnacle of web design? It seems that for problems involving a computational element like this, Javascript would be much more concise and readable. Having said that, it is beautifully done.

[deleted]

Re: Path menu in pure CSS3

#17

Post by sirn »

aiscott wrote: post #13
alex_h wrote: post #12

Can someone enlighten me as to why "pure CSS" is seen as the pinnacle of web design? It seems that for problems involving a computational element like this, Javascript would be much more concise and readable. Having said that, it is beautifully done.

People like to push a technology as far as they can. It's part of the satisfaction of mastering a tech that you think of ways to push it beyond what is considered the comfort zone of that tech. There might be some inherent value of avoiding javascript, but I think this is just a hack for the satisfaction of being able to do it.

> There might be some inherent value of avoiding javascript

CSS transitions are faster than JavaScript animations[1].

Browser could easily optimize them (since each keyframes are predefined) vs. DOM manipulation, which is always slow.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/CSS_animations

Re: Path menu in pure CSS3

#18

Post by _victa »

Flam wrote: post #3
robin_reala wrote: post #2

Would work in Firefox too with if the author had bothered to add the -moz-animation rules.

I came to write this. It's a nice experiment anyways.

If you watch the source here : https://github.com/Victa/path-menu/blob/master/sass/app.scss

// Generate keyframes

// Sass interpolation doesn't work with keyframe. CF : https://github.com/nex3/sass/issues/46

// so I use a tricks ==> "appear-'#{$i}'" - And it doesn't work in Firefox.

It's impossible to generate @-moz-Keyframes + interpolation with Sass yet. That's why the experiment works only in Webkit.

Re: Path menu in pure CSS3

#19

Post by ConstantineXVI »

AndyJPartridge wrote: post #14
steve8918 wrote: post #7

Obviously Path has done something great in terms of coming up with a beautiful, innovative menu design. Do people here think that Path should have been granted some type of protection so that others couldn't copy its look and feel so quickly, or it is okay that competitors have come out almost immediately? I am just asking the question, I'm not sure how I feel about the issue. I'm against software patents, but I coul…

I saw a very similar idea a while back here, and bookmarked it. http://playground.mobily.pl/jquery/mobily-blocks/demo.html It's a short breath away from what Path have done. I love the aesthetics of both, I have to say. Great work.

The concept itself isn't very far removed from pie menus[1]; which have been around for quite some time. They're much more common in console games these days (the layout maps very well to an analog stick or face buttons); SketchBook (on both the desktop and phones/tablets) is another recent example that comes to mind.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_menu

Re: Path menu in pure CSS3

#20

Post by mundizzle »

steve8918 wrote: post #7

Obviously Path has done something great in terms of coming up with a beautiful, innovative menu design. Do people here think that Path should have been granted some type of protection so that others couldn't copy its look and feel so quickly, or it is okay that competitors have come out almost immediately? I am just asking the question, I'm not sure how I feel about the issue. I'm against software patents, but I coul…

i'm sorry, i don't understand who is competing or how this hurts Path.

all i've seen are people being inspired by Path, saying as much, then cleverly recreating the effect for themselves. these same people turn around and share their own code with the rest of the world via blog post or GitHub.

if anything this has helped spread the word about Path. this was how i first heard of them. throw in a bunch of people sharing and learning code techniques and it's a win for everyone.

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