How to Enhance Your Sites with CSS3 Animations

How to use CSS3 Animations on your website without facing big G’s trouble of crawling and indexing

Right from the beginning, web designers have benefited from using CSS. Having a clear separation between the style and the structure is essential for both simple and complex websites. Apart from clearly separating the style element, CSS has helped web designers to create complex styles with its simple rules.

On the other hand, even though web designers use CSS extensively, some of its features haven’t gained much popularity due to lack of browser support. CSS3 animation is supported by Chrome and Safari but Opera and IE do not support them yet. As a result, CSS3 animation properties are yet to become popular among web designers. But irrespective of its popularity, the animation feature itself is elegantly designed as it allows you to develop animations without much coding. Be it complex animation or simple animation, you can do all kinds of animations with CSS animation module. If you have to develop an animation without CSS, then you have to learn a complete software package. That can be a time consuming process depending on the complexity of the animation software.

How to develop an animation using CSS3?

As with all CSS modules, animation too is defined as a set of properties. The key difference is the value of the animation properties are allowed to change over time. In any animation, you know the starting and ending time before hand, but depending on the type of animation, you should be able to control the intermediate values.

CSS3 uses “Keyframes” to obtain finer control of intermediate values. The keyframe rule starts with a @keyframes keyword followed by a user-defined identifier enclosed in single quotes. The keyframe rule then defines selectors with various percentages. It is necessary that every keyframe should have rules for 0% or 100%.

Every keyframe consist of a set of keyframe rules. Every keyframe rule in turn has a set of properties defined as key values pairs. If you define a property that cannot be animated, then that property is ignored by CSS instead of throwing an error. Moreover, you cannot cascade one keyframe within another one.

After you’ve define the keyframe, the next step is to apply this animation to an element. In order to identify this animation, you need to use the “animation-name” property. If you want to apply the animation defined above to “body” element, then you can do as follows:

body {

animation-name: myanimation;

}

CSS animation comes with many default properties. Here is a list of properties that you can override to fine tune the animation.

1. “animation-name”:

This property takes the name of the animation that you define in the @keyframe property. If the name you provide here does not match with any keyframes, then the corresponding properties wouldn’t be animated. However, if you want to disable an animation for testing purpose, then you can give “animation-name” as “none”.

2. “animation-duration”:

This property defines the time to complete an entire cycle of an animation. The default value of this property is 0, which means there won’t be any animation unless you override this property to a positive value. Negative value to this property is considered as 0.

3. “animation-timing-function”:

If you want to control how an animation would progress over one cycle, then you have to override this property. The permitted values are ease, linear, ease-in, ease-out, ease-in-out, and cubic-bezier. If you want to understand about the functionality of each of these in depth, then you have to apply each of these values and analyze the animation behavior. The timing function that you specify controls the time between keyframes. By default, the value is “ease-in”.

4. “animation-iteration-count”:

This property defines the number of times an animation has to be repeated. The default value is 1, which means an animation is played once from start till the end. The permissible values are “infinite” for infinite looping or you can give any positive number.

With CSS3, you can easily include animation in any website without much hassle. CSS3 provides a number of animation properties that you can customize to develop complex animations. As almost every site uses CSS, including animation code in CSS would reduce the coding and testing time. This is certainly far easier than learning a new animation package and then including those frames in a web page.

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Olawale Daniel

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Olawale Daniel is a seasoned blockchain technology consultant and digital media entrepreneur with years of experience in digital marketing, real estate, and tech publishing. He has had the chance of working with multinational firms in the field of marketing, branding, publishing and leadership. He loves tech support services!

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