When using scaling to change the size of an HTML element containing text, the text jitters during the animation, but only if being animated with JavaScript libraries.
The jittering is most visible when the animation is slower and the text is smaller. I can't seem to figure out what causes it or how to get rid of it.
This jittering does not occur during CSS animations or animations using the fairly new JavaScript Web Animations API. It also doesn't seem to occur in some browsers. (On my iPhone)
To easily compare the different methods of animating the scaling of an element and how they appear, I made a CodePen for convenience. Before checking it out, note these points:
All the animations are using some form or imitation of the CSS property transform: scale(num); for the animation and have the same easing and duration so they can be compared more easily.
Although the jittering appears on macOS too, it is almost impossible to see on Macs with retina screens because of the high resolution.
The results I got are a reflection of the appearance of the animations on a Windows 10 machine in Google Chrome 59, although for me Microsoft Edge also showed the same results.
So my question is this: How can I prevent the text from jittering or becoming blurry when animating a scale property with JavaScript? How can I make the text in my JavaScript scale animations appear just as smooth as they do when using CSS?
You may be wondering why I don't just use CSS. The answer is because I'm frustrated with how limited CSS animation is. I would like to use advanced easing functions beyond the capabilities of a simple bezier curve (like Robert Penner's bounce and elastic functions), and use different easings on hover when the mouse enters and exits the element. This s completely my own opinion, but so far the only painless way I've found to do this is with JavaScript libraries. Besides their functionality relating to easing, most seem to offer many other capabilities which make animating much more effortless. If you know of a better way to get all the functionality I need please let me know!
What you are encountering are differences in a browser's layerizing strategy. You'll find that all the examples appear smooth in Firefox. That's because Firefox detects when script is changing a property that can animated using layers and creates a layer in response.
Although all browsers create layers when needed for declarative animations (CSS animations, CSS transitions, Web Animations API animations, and even SVG SMIL animations in some cases) not all browsers do it for Javascript animations. So, for those browsers you need to try to trick the browser into creating a layer (or, you could just file a bug on the browser, since it really should do this for you!).
Until recently, using will-change: transform was the recommended approach to get a browser to create a layer. However, Chrome changed its rendering strategy and now will-change: transform can produce very blurry results with scale animations in Chrome. Some people have succeeded in tricking Chrome to layerize at a higher resolution initially and then scaling their element down before animating. This is really unfortunate to have to do this and I can only encourage you to petition Chrome to fix this.
Also, the examples using "with HA" are not accurate. The CSS animation in (1) will also use hardware acceleration in every browser I know of--there's no need to add perspective in. Unfortunately, there is a lot of misleading information in this area (e.g. some articles claim animations can run on the GPU but that's simply not true). At the risk of self promotion, you might find an article I wrote on this last year helpful.
So I've been working on browser compatibility. Unfortunately, when I first designed my site, I desigend the CSS aesthetically for Firefox only. Now I'm having all sorts of trouble trying to get it to look good in the other major browsers. However, when I fix the CSS positioning such as floating a box object to the right, IE8 forces it left. I checked my code on W3C and it's okay semantically. I use little to no javascript. It's a portfolio website. The screensize shifts everything around no matter what browser, yet there is no perfect CSS for this so how does one get things to stay in place? I'm not too familiar with JQuery, but this seems to be the closest I can get to an answer. Where would I plug this into my site to see if this works?
I've developed HTML5 game with canvas and DOM elements. And I have problem with flickering DOM elements while playing. The problem occurs in mobile browsers, especially in Chrome.
My apps consists of full screen canvas and DOM elements as GUI (ie. popups). There is many objects rendered on canvas in loop. While playing suddenly DOM elements start flickering (not integrally but regular fragments). DOM elements are positioned absolutely and scaled on window resize by CSS3 (transform:scale).
I cannot publish the code because it's commercial project, but I attach screens below.
http://mywebpage.ovh.org/1.jpg
http://mywebpage.ovh.org/2.jpg
http://mywebpage.ovh.org/3.jpg
Does anyone know the reason and the solution?
Thanks in advance!
I don't think you posted any screenshots, but most likely because it is redrawing it without a buffer. I would take a look at double buffering, I know when I coded flash and java games back in the day buffers really solved a lot of the flickering.
Heres a previous question which may be helpful:
Does HTML5/Canvas Support Double Buffering?
edit: okay I see the screenies now, It's probably not double buffering, but CSS. I would double check your CSS for any thing like background-attachment: fixed or position: fixed, I know that sometimes gives flickering in Chrome.
I recently took an interest in building websites and am still very inexperienced, so my apologies if this is easily answered.
I was asked by a friend to build her a simple portfolio website for fashion designs. As such, the website mainly has image galleries. The images come in various sizes and rather than ordering them manually to make it look better, I found the Masonry plugin. I implemented masonry.pkgd.min.js into my code (initialized through the HTML) and ran into two issues:
The main issue that might make question 2 moot entirely… It looks fine in IE and Firefox, but the images come up overlapping in Chrome and it looks horrible. I cleared my cache several times and tried implementing the imagesLoaded plug-in, which did absolutely nothing. I am very new to Javascript and as such have to rely on copy/pasting this sort of plug-in whereas someone else might be able to delve in and tweak it, but at the same time I had no issues getting tabbed content and this does work in two browsers. Any idea why it doesn’t work in Chrome and what I can do to fix it?
After the plug-in, I don’t seem to have any control over automatically centering the image columns in the gallery/container and they are aligned left by nature. I more or less fixed this by manually setting a margin-left that puts everything in the right place, but would like to know if there is a better solution.
Please let me know if I need to include screenshots or specific code.
Issue One:
Try adding imagesLoaded. Chrome in particular has an issue if you don't use it with masonry. I suggest trying the solution in the third box first, it's the easiest and fastest loading. This code will go in your .js file if you have one, or in your script tags if you don't.
If the "why" interests you, it's because your containers load before your pictures and don't know how tall they should be.
Issue Two:
You're right on with this one. You can't center the whole masonry container itself (you can get close, but at certain browser widths there will be a small gutter on the right), but you can center the images within their containers by adding a margin like you did or using:
position: relative;
margin-right: auto;
margin-left: auto;
My designer believes this cannot be done, however it seems possible to me. (Although I have limited CSS experience). However, he also said the background couldn't be fixed, and stackoverflow has proved his wrong in the past; so I question his knowledge.
JQuery can be used if this cannot be done in pure CSS.
The top half will be a gradient that has full flexible to skew left, right, up, down without much distortion. The bottom half is an image that is ideally made for the 1280 x 1024 resolution (as this is the most popular browser display resolution). Then depending on the requirements needed it will sketch and skew to whatever size it needs. Still allowing all of the image to be seen.
The ration between the top half and bottom half is always 50% 50% independent of browser resolution.
I would also like if both the top and bottom parts are fixed.
In a perfect world (one without IE), id like to do this with css3 gradients and multiple backgrounds in 1 DIV. However, because IE9 isnt out yet, I think the best way to approach it would be 2 divs in a DIV container and using a PNG repeating background for the top div.
It should be noted I am going to use css3pie.com to allow some CSS3 for IE6-8 (but I dont want to rely on it, unless 100% proven)
Is this possible with just CSS? How would you do it?
If not possible with just CSS, is there a way I can get JavaScript/JQuery to aid?
I am thinking a base of 1280 x 1024 isn't the best idea because it seems to have an odd radio.
Edit 1
Oh yeah, I have a WIP too:
http://meyers.ipalaces.org/extra/
It looks good in 1280 x 1024...now its just getting the whole resizing of the top DIV to be 50% so the image is 50%.
I'd still like ALL of the water to be seen, because I like the look of the rocks at the bottom. However, I am open to alternative ideas that don't accomplish what I want 100%, but come close.
Edit 2
How about using the top gradient as the true CSS2 background and then just putting a <img> at the bottom of it to resize? Perhaps that will allow for CSS2 ability. I am reference some work-around techniques here: A list apart
Edit 3
I am still looking for results that work on IE6 and also don't cause Internet explorer to lag. I am setting a bounty of 50 to help attract more attention.
I have successfully came up with 2 ways to do this:
Method 1
Click here to view demo
Using CSS3 background-size I was able to set 2 div elements to on top of each other with min-height: 50% and then using background-size: 100% 50% they successfully accomplish what I am looking for.
This method was just a proof of concept, as IE6-8 does not support background-size, I didn't pursue tweaking this method perfectly. As it stands, it currently messes up when you scroll despite have background-attachment: fixed;. I ditched this CSS3 method in order to look for better methods using CSS tricks...
Method 2
Click here to view demo
Following the examples I found from A List Apart (Article | Example1 | Example2). I used Technique #2 from Example 1, and I was able to emulate what I wanted to do using just CSS2. (I am not 100% sure how or why this works, but it does)
Because I am also going to use CSS3PIE to give IE6-8 CSS3 the ability to do linear gradients, border-radius, and box-shadow; I opted to use a linear gradient instead of an image for the top background.
Problems
CSS2 Method from Technique #2, Example 1 does not work with IE6 Correctly
Creates excessive lag in all current Internet Explorers
It can be done with CSS only. No PIEs necessary. Just an IE6 bug and some filter magic.
Demo:
http://www.bundyo.org/test/FPB.html
Do this using raphaeljs. Create a background DIV that becomes a canvas, draw a rect to 50% of the page height (if using jquery then use $(window).resize() to monitor for a window resize and $(window).height() to get the 50% into pixels).
You can fill in the raphealjs rect with specifing it's fill value to something like fill: "90-#000000-#ffffff"
As for the image:
Place the image using raphealjs' image OR just embed it using HTML and update it's height-scale using jquery as mentioned above.
I've done something like this just recently using about 10 lines of code.
Also: Change your water.png, it's about 275kb, where as the next largest file on your page (the css) is like 1.5kb.
If you want to keep the horizon of the water at 50% on your screen, I would suggest a simpler method;
Create an image (probably about 1280 wide) in Photoshop of water on bottom and gradient on top. Fade the top gradient into a solid light blue(#68b for example). Fade the left, right and bottom of the image into the same solid color(#68b).
Set the background of your page as follows;
html {
background: #68b url(waterimage.png) center center no-repeat;
}
In your case, you'll probably want to apply the background to #wdth-100 instead of html, but it all depends on which element you want to put your background on.
All done. Let me know if that works for you.
I don't have a link to your top image, so i used the same image for top and bottom.
You should probably use a CSS solution for normal browsers and the JS for IE.
<script type='text/javascript'>
$(document).ready(function() {
wh=$(window).height();
ww=$(window).width();
if(wh%2) {
h1=Math.round(wh/2);
h2=Math.round(wh/2)-1;
} else {
h1=h2=wh/2;
}
img1=$("<IMG/>",{'src':'http://meyers.ipalaces.org/images/bottom-bg.jpg','id':'img1'} )
.css({'width':ww,'height':h1,'top':'0','left':'0','position':'absolute','z-index':'-100'});
img2=$("<IMG/>",{'src':'http://meyers.ipalaces.org/images/bottom-bg.jpg','id':'img2'} )
.css({'width':ww,'height':h2,'top':h1,'left':'0','position':'absolute','z-index':'-100'});
$(document.body).append(img1);
$(document.body).append(img2);
});
$(window).resize(function() {
wh=$(window).height();
ww=$(window).width();
if(wh%2) {
h1=Math.round(wh/2);
h2=Math.round(wh/2)-1;
} else {
h1=h2=wh/2;
}
$('#img1').css({'width':ww,'height':h1,'top':'0','left':'0'});
$('#img2').css({'width':ww,'height':h2,'top':h1,'left':'0'});
});
</script>
The pragmatic answer would seem to be to do it using multiple divs with their own background, all of which would be positioned absolutely and behind everything else using z-index.
I know that's not the clean markup solution with a single div with some magic CSS, but this is a tricky problem in pure CSS in any browser, and almost certainly impossible if you need to support IE6.
An even more pragmatic answer would be to say "I'll support IE6 as far as I can, but if it can't support my lovely background effect then that's just tough luck for anyone still using it".