Beautify the Web with awesome layout animations
Framework-agnostic Layout Projection and Layout-Projection-powered layout animation implementations with exquisite adapters for various frameworks.
Layout animations have always been a challenge for web developers, especially when it comes to implementing advanced layout animations like shared-element transitions.
To address this issue, Matt Perry invented Layout Projection, which is a Web animation technique making it possible to implement GPU-accelerated layout animations in the Web platform by calculating and applying appropriate CSS transform styles on elements in each animation frame.
Checkout Inside Framer Motion's Layout Animations - Matt Perry for more details.
Matt Perry heavily applied the Layout Projection technique in Framer Motion, a well-known React animation library. Unfortunately, this left out web developers who don't use React.
Therefore, here we offer a framework-agnostic implementation of Layout Projection with a variety of framework adapters to enable all web developers to enhance their applications with layout animations!
FLIP (First Last Invert Play) is also a technique for performing layout animations using CSS transforms, where the elements are also transformed to pretend that they are in their previous layout and then animated back to their new layouts.
However, instead of calculating transforms for both the element and its children and update the transform styles in each animation frame, FLIP simply apply a transition for the transform property and removes the entire transform style to animate the element, which would cause severe distortion on the child elements if the aspect ratio of the element is changed.
Layout Projection, in the other hand, perfectly prevented the distortion by animating the element frame by frame and applying a distortion-cancelling transform to all the child elements in each animation frame, enabling more advanced layout animations like container transforms.
Big thank to @taowen for providing the GitHub Gist copy of the missing original blog by Matt Perry about the tech details of Layout Projection.