Exploring the majestic new animation-timeline API
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One of the best ways to add a bit of personality to our websites is to animate things on scroll.
No. I can't remember this sort of thing ever adding anything to my experience on a website. It's usually annoying and distracts from the actual content.
Absolutely. Scrolljacking is annoying as hell!
I am against scrolljacking too. Though having read through the article, and seen the animation in action at https://whimsy.joshwcomeau.com/, this is not scrolljacking, it's just something that animates as you scroll. It's so unobtrusive that I didn't notice it the first time.
Given this is achieved with CSS, there is no reason that users can't disable animations with a user style sheet. In fact this is what some users do, according to a CSS Working Group discussion about disabling view transitions.
Some users do set
transition-duration: 0 !importantin user style sheets in order to prevent transitions, same withanimation: none !importantor so.
And that is something the average user does instead of just hitting the back button?
Do we know the average user hits the back button when they encounter CSS animations? I was just a conference, and people were talking about browsing the web in reader mode, which I'd argue is more likely.
So why do animations and pretty design at all?
That is a good question. The beauty of the web is that readers can control their experience, be it with ad blockers, increasing the font-size, reader mode, or even changing the whole experience with user style sheets or Greasemonkey. This doesn't mean it's a waste of time to bother with pretty designs. People should build websites that they're proud of, and accept that people might override their design with one better suited to their needs or taste.
I do not believe that should include design elements that annoy most people (as I do believe scrolling animations do), even if they're free to get rid of them. Don't even get me started on accessibility issues. If a website annoys me and hasn't proven that its contents are worth it (guess how many times that has happened), I won't bother to go through all that hoopla but get my information elsewhere.
Websites that let me scroll down and up without any annoying animated hindrance have my thanks.