Animated Timelines and Keyframes

There are several different ways to make animated timelines and keyframes, as there are several different ways to make it, but the most popular way to make an animated timeline is through Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). There are two different methods, transitions and normal animations. Transitions and traditional animations, the difference being is that transitions are animations that occur upon interaction with the property, and animation automatically begins once the page loads. Keyframes only identify the beginning and end of the animation and are a lot more important than they seem. The best file formats for web animations are scalable vector graphics (SVG), SMIL, GIF, and canvas, with GIF being the most popular as they are the most simplistic, light, and lossless file. Albeit not perfect, they are more than good enough for simple web animation. They’re suitable for short loop animations, image sequences, and short video loops.

These animations are mainly made through CSS code. CSS is a cross-browser library of CSS animations with the “father” of CSS being Håkon Wium Lie. CSS is helpful to many as it lets creators quickly create layouts and troubleshoot problems. It was introduced in 1996 but it gained popularity mainly around the early 2000s when browsers started supporting it, and the fact that it is open source and free to use. Starting off with the basics, an example of how to change basic elements such as duration, delay, or number of times it will repeat are as follows:

.elementNAME {
	animation-duration: 3s;
	animation-delay: 2s;
	animation-iteration-count: infinite;
	}

That’s a nearly universal code for CSS as they’re extremely basic, so then after that you can get Animate.css file templates available on the site. The code is generally short which makes it easy to use, and pages load much quicker with CSS. They are made of 3 basic things, which are Animation name, animation stages, and animation style/CSS properties. CSS also consists of keyframes and JavaScript. JavaScript correctly used, can control the animations and make it much better with just a bit of extra code from Java. There are also different types of animations, which include Tooltips, Hover, Loading, Inputs, and Menus. Well done animations can add valuable interaction, enhance emotional experience for users. You don’t have to necessarily use JavaScript, but it can make things easier and can make things much better than HTML, Java itself, or even Flash (although that shut down not too long ago).

Source 1 Featured Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash