GreenSock

The year was 1995; Toy Story hit the theaters, kids were obsessively collecting little cardboard circles and Kiss From a Rose was being badly sung by everyone. I was a gangly ten-year-old, and like any other relatively tall kid I was often addressed to by "you must be so good at basketball!". So I practiced and practiced spending hours on the court of my elementary school. Eventually, I realized, much to the dismay of aunts and other cheek-pinchers alike, that while occupying vertical real estate might give you an advantage in the art of basketball, it does not ensure it.

Fast forward 21 years later. Now a tall and gangly developer, still bad at basketball, I was faced with a project: Designing and implementing a full motion video web basketball game for the NBA’s Detroit Pistons. Throwing balls around is one thing; throwing pixels around — now that's finally a basketball challenge I can ace!

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The question I am asked most frequently: what animation tool do you recommend?

Having worked with a slew of them, I can tell you there is no right answer. It's a complicated question and complicated answer. This post serves to clarify what to use, and when, to get you working with the right tool for the job.

If you’re here for React, we’ve got you covered! Jump down to the React section below and we’ll break down what to use and how to use it.

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SMIL, SVG’s native animation specification, has been highly regarded because it offers so many bells and whistles for performant SVG animation rendering. Unfortunately, support for SMIL is waning in WebKit, and has never (nor will likely ever) exist for Microsoft’s IE or Edge browsers. Have no fear! We’ve got you covered. This article explores some of those SMIL-specific features and delves into the alternatives to achieve the same effects with a longer tail of support.

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When Chris first started the CSS-Tricks redesign, he came to me with some screenshots of the direction it was headed in, and suggested that I make an animation for the logo as part of the design refresh. I was excited about this project, and my mind immediately started to shuffle through possible animation and interaction.

I’ve been working a ton with the GreenSock Animation Platform and SVG lately. If you are not aware of it, is worth checking out. It’s very good at performant animation, complex timelines, and cross-browser stability in animation, among other things.

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The following is a guest post by Sarah Drasner (@sarah_edo). Sarah has been researching and giving talks about animation lately. I jumped at the chance to have her share some of that research here, this time focusing on SVG animation and the different tech choices you can make to do it.

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