This is pretty much how I feel most of the time. It often seems like simple things are hard and hard things are simple, and even after years and lots of different projects, I still end up playing "guess-and-check" with complicated centering stuff.
background-clip? Sometimes I think CSS has gone a bit too far. Sure, at first it was wholly insufficient, but now it seems to have gone overboard the other way, sprouting too many obscure features, with greatly varying support between implementations to boot.
Some people want these effects. Without them, the choice is to write it all by hand using canvas, or use animated gifs or Flash or something.
Sure, there are varying levels of support of the most bleeding edge features, but browsers are catching up with each other all the time. For real world sites, you use what's widely available, which corresponds to the gee-whiz demos from 5 years ago (give or take, and depending on how many truly obsolete users you need to support). So yeah, this isn't really all that useful outside of a gee-whiz demo now, but in a few years all of the major browsers will support it and people can use it. This kind of effect is most likely to be used in a game that has a large asset library to load, but the underlying functionality can be useful in a variety of designs.
Yeah, fuck having options! Is there SaaS that will let me ship my website in the form of a newspaper to my customers so they don't have to endure my fancy styles?
The current wave of CSS3 effects are very much akin to the early days of Flash. Oftentimes it's a superfluous effect that hampers readability or usability, and I sincerely hope some lessons were learned from the Flash heyday. Just because you can move your content in 3D, add transitions and effects -- all in browser-native rules -- doesn't mean you should.
I'm on a pretty beefy Macbook most of the time and there are a lot of simple-looking sites that are almost impossible to use because of the slow-down from their page effects. The scrolling behavior from parallax or fixed effects really seem to be the worst.
If you want to see the next wave of CSS effects, just check out one of the old copypasta providers like DynamicDrive or FlashKit. ;)
Already in my game loading screen! XD
Just some tweaks to include the game name + small loading text. Also added easing and alternate to wave-animation.
https://apps.facebook.com/lines-up/
I'm asking for all permissions available.. I think it might help in the future when I need something like matching.. I don't know. For now is only using the friends name and online status, if I remeber well.
It's a wavey background masked by the text, that loops scrolling horizontally, and increases in height to show loading progress.
It uses the background-clip:text property that is not very widely supported, though.
