[whatwg] A better animation API

[Ian Hickson]

On Sat, 10 Dec 2011, Robert Eisele wrote:
> 
> mozRequestAnimationFrame became part of Firefox 4 Beta 4 and as a result 
> also (o|webkit|ms)RequestAnimationFrame got implemented. This way 
> animations can be slow downed safely to a minimum when the animation is 
> executed in an inactive tab or something like that. Also the performance 
> and the synchronicity with CSS keyframes can be improved directly inside 
> the browser. [...]
> 
> All that's nice, but why is there no general proposal implementing a 
> native setInterval replacement? Also Robert O'Callhan mentioned a 
> beginAnimation/endAnimation-API: 
> http://robert.ocallahan.org/2010/08/mozrequestanimationframe_14.html . 
> Sure, it's more dangerous but also setInterval has this kind of hazard.
> 
> It's certainly also more difficult to implement but asking for every 
> frame to continue has also the disadvantage of beeing as slow as setting 
> up a new timeout for every frame. That's why setInterval surpass 
> setTimeout's performance (okay, at least it should).
> 
> Maybe an API would also make sense, which runs for a given duration. 
> This way, animations like jQuery's animate() could profit immensely from 
> a native API. [...]

On Mon, 12 Dec 2011, Nicholas C. Zakas wrote:
>
> I'd like to +1 the suggestion for a continuous animation loop, though if 
> I remember correctly I think the concern about such an API was that it 
> would lead to forgotten animations that would keep going long past they 
> should.
> 
> I'd much rather have an API to start and stop animations, but I'm not 
> sure if the developer convenience outweighs the potential downside of 
> forgotten, long-running paint requests.

I recommend approaching the Web Performance working group who are working 
on the animation API:

   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web-perf/

-- 
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