Considering that, there’s hardly any solid need for CSS (which is and has always been essentially a tool for styling content) to take it’s place. Seems to me that we’re trying to reinvent the wheel here.

I’m also a bit worried about how much focus all this CSS transition / transform talk could be taking away from actually cultivating it’s initial purpose. CSS is nowhere near perfection as a styling tool yet, so why don’t we take it a few steps further in that area before expanding to others?

(These are, naturally, just my opinions. And you all know what they say about opinions.)

How should you express animations in a formal way?

With JavaScript? It’s been done for well over a decade. A thousand ways, and no end in sight.

The concept of codeless animation on the web isn’t new.

SMIL2 (HTML+TIME) in IE 5.5+ (summer 1999) was a good start, but the more I used it back when it came out, the more I wanted to just style some element animation without copying a dozen attributes every time.

Which looks more natural?

.clickme {background-color: #000; }
.clickme:hover { transition: background-color 1s linear #00f; }

Click here

or

Click here

$(‘.clickme’).style.backgroundColor.animate(“#000″, “#0F0”, “hover”, 0, 100);

(apologies for the pidgin jQuery and css anim — it would look something like that though)

One more thing — if tied to JS, you cannot guarantee when an animation starts/stops, how it’s supposed to degrade when there’s 1000 animated elements. Stopping on a JS error somewhere else, etc.

We already have the mess of that!