With CSS3 came new ways to position and alter elements. Now general layout techniques can be revisited with alternative ways to size, position, and change elements. All of these new techniques are made possible by the transform property.
The transform property comes in two different settings, two-dimensional and three-dimensional. Each of these come with their own individual properties and values.
Within this lesson we’ll take a look at both two-dimensional and three-dimensional transforms. Generally speaking, browser support for the transform property isn’t great, but it is getting better every day. For the best support vendor prefixes are encouraged, however you may need to download the nightly version of Chrome to see all of these transforms in action.
One evolution with CSS3 was the ability to write behaviors for transitions and animations. Front end developers have been asking for the ability to design these interactions within HTML and CSS, without the use of JavaScript or Flash, for years. Now their wish has come true.
With CSS3 transitions you have the potential to alter the appearance and behavior of an element whenever a state change occurs, such as when it is hovered over, focused on, active, or targeted.
Animations within CSS3 allow the appearance and behavior of an element to be altered in multiple keyframes. Transitions provide a change from one state to another, while animations can set multiple points of transition upon different keyframes.
As mentioned, for a transition to take place, an element must have a change in state, and different styles must be identified for each state. The easiest way for determining styles for different states is by using the :hover, :focus, :active, and :target pseudo-classes.
There are four transition related properties in total, including transition-property, transition-duration, transition-timing-function, and transition-delay. Not all of these are required to build a transition, with the first three are the most popular.