Today we’re diving into a mysterious and fascinating topic: animation . These days, it’s more relevant than ever, since modern interfaces demand a high level of interactivity and simplicity—which is exactly what well-crafted CSS animation can help you achieve.
Animation in CSS3
Animation is a smooth transition of an element from one state to another over time. And now, this change can be defined directly in the CSS file. In the past, you had to write quite bulky JavaScript code to achieve this effect (with the benefit of cross-browser compatibility), but now we can define animations using just a few CSS rules.
What is a keyframe?
For an animation to work, you need to use what are called keyframes — the “key frames” of an animation.
A keyframe lets you define the position (or state) of an element at a specific moment in time. That’s what makes an element animated—and creating keyframes is a crucial part of building animations.
How?
CSS animation is created in two steps: first you create the keyframes, and then you apply them to a rule.
Let’s go step by step.
To create a keyframe , you need to write the following structure in CSS:
Inside the curly braces, you literally describe any change to the element—this is the keyframe action. Using the keywords from and to, you tell the browser where the animation starts and ends.
After the from and to keywords, you open and close curly braces (of course). This is where the magic begins. In the from block, you define the element’s state before the animation; in the to block—after the animation. Simple as that.
For example, if you want to move an element to the right from 50px to 450px, your code would look like this:
(Here should be a code snippet, assumed omitted in the original.)
But that’s only half the job. For the animation to work, you need to link the keyframe to a selector. This is done using the properties animation-name and animation-duration, which define which keyframe applies to the element, and how long the animation will last.
Let’s say we want to apply this effect to a block (which should already be defined in your HTML). Then your CSS would look like this:
(Here should be another code snippet, assumed omitted in the original.)
Conclusion
CSS3 animation is a flexible and powerful tool that can make any static page beautiful , full of motion and effects. Of course, there are many more settings to explore, so stay tuned for the next part of the article.
In the meantime, good luck with your web development !