Creating a WebKit Animation

Many people on the Internet claim that WebKit extensions and HTML5 (discussed in Chapter 10) will eliminate the need for Flash and other types of animation software. Although it's true that some of these enhancements might eliminate the need for external programs for some of the simplest animations and other effects, what you can do with WebKit extensions is limited. Flash and other web special-effects tools are in no big danger from this quarter.

With that said, what you can do with WebKit extensions is pretty nifty, and — since WebKit extensions are native and often hardware-accelerated — animations and other affects you build with them display and perform much faster than those you create with external utilities and embed in your web pages. So the animations you create with the WebKit extension –webkit-animation are not only fun to create but they also initiate quickly and run smoothly. After all, there are no bulky external files to download; the animation is achieved with a few lines of code and the browser does the rest.