Tuesday, April 29, 2014

JS animations are cool again

A while back GSAP made a (at the time controversial) claim that JS-based animations are actually as fast as CSS based ones (if not faster). It's just jQuery that is slow.

Now, there's Velocity.js, which brings that GSAP-like speed back to the world of jQuery.

What GSAP showed us is that Javascript animations can be really powerful (or as it advertises, "impossible w/ CSS3"). A similar trend is that of constraint-based layout engines popping up. In the Mithril blog and docs, I've been talking about the expressive power of Javascript in the context of data binding engines and template componentization (something that has been generally in the domain of the HTML language) and this same expressive power is starting to flourish in the styling and flair arena.

It's really looking like Javascript is taking the reins away from CSS. I like this trend.

Monday, April 28, 2014