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Maintaining CSS Style States using "Infinite" Transition Delays

joelb.me

11–19 of 19 posts

Re: Maintaining CSS Style States using "Infinite" Transition Delays

#12
This (the original technique) is dangerous, of course - the browser might end up wasting a bit of CPU/power doing a nice 60fps animation of nothing. Even if this turns out not to make a significant difference in most cases, it's better to stick with JavaScript.

Re: Maintaining CSS Style States using "Infinite" Transition Delays

#14

This is pretty cool, but it also represents one of my main beefs with the HTML5/CSS standards and their past, current and future direction. That is the substantial amount of cognitive friction involved in doing many relative simple, even sometimes common things. Implementation of often basic UI design concepts and interactions can quite often require some serious contortions of the HTML, CSS or both (though very fort…

there's 'cognitive friction' if you implement things in obtuse ways. fortunately web application development has a clean and easy way to accomplish these sorts of things: it's called javascript.

Re: Maintaining CSS Style States using "Infinite" Transition Delays

#15
post #6

Everytime I see a new technique I get all excited. Then I check it on Internet Explorer and the excitement fades. On IE-9 it works the first time you try it but then the other buttons don't have any effect. Just once I'd like an organization to have a corporate standard that mandates Chrome's latest version.

Something just occurred to me: Why exactly does microsoft still put any time into developing IE? Is there any benefit to them besides driving users to bing and other microsoft sites? Based on their licenses couldn't microsoft take the latest copy of firefox/chromium and just rebrand it, wouldn't they get the same exact benefit without wasting money on development?

Re: Maintaining CSS Style States using "Infinite" Transition Delays

#16
post #6

Everytime I see a new technique I get all excited. Then I check it on Internet Explorer and the excitement fades. On IE-9 it works the first time you try it but then the other buttons don't have any effect. Just once I'd like an organization to have a corporate standard that mandates Chrome's latest version.

Something just occurred to me: Why exactly does microsoft still put any time into developing IE? Is there any benefit to them besides driving users to bing and other microsoft sites? Based on their licenses couldn't microsoft take the latest copy of firefox/chromium and just rebrand it, wouldn't they get the same exact benefit without wasting money on development?

At least initially, I think it was to maintain an applications barrier to entry--think all those businesses keeping IE6 around to run their web-based applications. Also, if a broken web browser is the most used, Joe Sixpack will think that standard-conforming web sites are broken rather than thinking that the web browser is broken, and thus stick with IE.

Re: Maintaining CSS Style States using "Infinite" Transition Delays

#17
post #13

The first sentence doesn't change colors on my iPad.

It doesn’t if I use a tap-click on my trackpad either; it only seems to if you hold it down.

Do these actions (tap-click, screen touch) not send separate mouse{down,up} events? Because that might be related.

Re: Maintaining CSS Style States using "Infinite" Transition Delays

#19

This is pretty cool, but it also represents one of my main beefs with the HTML5/CSS standards and their past, current and future direction. That is the substantial amount of cognitive friction involved in doing many relative simple, even sometimes common things. Implementation of often basic UI design concepts and interactions can quite often require some serious contortions of the HTML, CSS or both (though very fort…

there's 'cognitive friction' if you implement things in obtuse ways. fortunately web application development has a clean and easy way to accomplish these sorts of things: it's called javascript.

I could go on about the cognitive friction of javascript itself as a language but that's another discussion, but yes, I would almost certainly use javascript for this. I'm not really talking about this specific example, but a myriad of other examples where using transitions and other CSS features do make sense.

My favorite example is the way transitions handle height/width properties set it auto, in that they just don't. If you do decide to change the height of an "auto" sized item and want a transition you instead have to set it's current height explicitly (in Javascript) first, then set it to the height of the to the height of the new content (having calculated that somehow. What is worse you can't have the transition turned on, because setting from auto to X with the transitions on will cause a transition 'blip' from 0 to X.

The fact that this very simple and obvious case (that of changing the contents of something and having the height transition smoothly) was not addressed in the transition specifications is exactly what I am talking about.

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