KUTE.js

Supported Properties

KUTE.js covers all animation needs by itself for transform properties, scroll for window or a given element, colors. Note: not all browsers support 2D transforms or 3D transforms. With the help of some plugins it also covers SVG specific properties, presentation attributes, or other CSS properties like border-radius, clip, backgroundPosition and more box model properties.

Starting with KUTE.js version 1.5.0 the supported properties are split among some plugins to have a lighter core engine that gives more power to the developer. Due to it's modular coding, KUTE.js makes it easy to add support for additional properties, so check out the guide on how to extend.

All common measurement units are supported: px and % for translations and box-model properties, or deg and rad for rotations and skews, while clip only supports px. Other properties such as opacity, scale or scroll are unitless, and background-position always uses % as measurement unit. As for the text properties you can use px, em, rem, vh and vw. Be sure to check what your browsers support in terms of measurement unit.

Opacity

In most cases, the best animation possible is the opacity, for performance, aesthetics and maybe more other reasons such as avoiding unwanted layout changes. KUTE.js also covers IE8 here with the help of proprietary synthax filter: alpha(opacity=0). Also, opacity can be used for instance on legacy browsers that don't support RGBA colors. Eg. opacity:0.5 will make an element semitransparent.

2D Transform Properties

The core engine supports most 2D transform properties, but the most important part is that starting with KUTE.js v1.6.0 the values used for animation are always converted from percentage based translation to pixels and radians based angles to degrees, to help improve memory efficiency.

3D Transform Properties

The core engine supports all 3D transform properties except matrix3d and rotate3d. Just as the above, these properties' values are also converted to traditional pixels and degrees measurements to help improve memory usage.

SVG Transform

The SVG Plugin features cross browser 2D transform animations via the svgTransform tween property and the transform presentation attribute, similar in functionality as the Attributes Plugin.

As a quick note, the translation is normalized and computed in a way to handle the transformOrigin tween option in all cases, not just for rotations, but also scaling or skews.

SVG Properties

The SVG Plugin can animate the d attribute of a given <path> or <glyph> element with the tween property called path. The animation effect is widelly known as morph SVG and implemented in various scripts, but the KUTE.js implementation is similar to the D3.js examples for wider usability and the ability to optimize the visual and performance of the morph, all with the help of special tween options and utilities.

Further more, the SVG Plugin can animate the stroke in a way that you probably know as drawSVG. KUTE.js implements it as draw tween property that deals with the well known CSS properties: strokeDasharray and strokeDashoffset.

Box Model Properties

The core engine supports width, height, left and top while the CSS Plugin adds support for all other box-model properties.

As a quick side note, starting with KUTE.js v1.6.0 the core engine supported box model properties values are converted from percent based into pixel based values, using the element.offsetWidth as a refference. The idea is the same as presented on the above supported transform properties.

Remember: these properties are layout modifiers that may force repaint of the entire DOM, drastically affecting performance on lower end and mobile devices. They also trigger resize event that may cause crashes on old browsers such as IE8 when using handlers bound on resize, so use with caution.

Border Radius

The CSS Plugin covers all the radius properties with the exception that shorthand notations are not implemented.

For all radius properties above borderRadius:20 or borderTopLeftRadius:'25%' will do. In the first case px is the default measurement unit used, while in the second we require using % unit which is relative to the element's size.

Remember: shorthands for border-radius are not supported. Also KUTE.js does not cover early implementations by Mozilla Firefox (Eg. -moz-border-radius-topleft) as they were deprecated with later versions.

Color Properties

The core engine only supports color and backgroundColor, but the CSS Plugin covers all the others. KUTE.js currently supports values such as HEX, RGB and RGBA for all color properties, but IE8 does not support RGBA and always uses RGB when detected, otherwise will produce no effect. There is also a tween option keepHex:true to convert the color format. Eg. color: '#ff0000' or backgroundColor: 'rgb(202,150,20)' or borderColor: 'rgba(250,100,20,0.5)'. The IE9+ browsers should also work with web safe colors, eg. color: 'red'.

Remember: shorthands for borderColor property are not supported.

Presentation Attributes

The Attributes Plugin can animate any numerical presentation attribute such as width, cx or stop-opacity, but the values can be also suffixed: 150px or 50%, and for that you must always provide a string value that include the measurement unit, and that, of course, depends on the attribute. This plugin can be a great addition to the above SVG Plugin for specific gradient attributes or specific geometric shapes' attributes.

Starting KUTE.js 1.6.0 the Attributes Plugin can also animate color attributes such as stroke, fill or stop-color, and they are removed from the SVG Plugin, and the reason for that is the new bundle build that incorporates both plugins into an unified file.

The synthax is slightly different to make sure we don't mess up with CSS properties that have the same name because the presentation attribute may be a unitless attribute while the CSS property might require a suffix (%,px,etc). For instance KUTE.to('selector', {attr:{width:150}}) is clearly different from KUTE.to('selector', {width:150}) which is the the CSS property with the same name.

The plugin handles attribute namespaces properly which means you can use both Javascript notation (like stopColor) and HTML markup notation (like 'stop-color'), see the below example.

EG: KUTE.to('selector', {attr:{stroke:'blue'}}) to animate the stroke of an SVG element or KUTE.to('selector', {attr:{'stop-color':'red'}}) to animate the stop color of some SVG gradient.

Typography Properties

The CSS Plugin also cover the text properties, and these can be combinated with each other when applied to text elements (paragraphs, headings) as animation fallback for scale on browsers that don't support transform at all. Yes, IE8 and other legacy browsers.

Remember: these properties are layout modifiers.

Scroll Animation

KUTE.js core engine currently supports only vertical scroll for both the window and a given element that's scrollable (when scrollHeight is higher than offsetHeight). EG: scroll: 150 will scroll an element or window to 150px from top to bottom. When animating scroll, KUTE.js will disable all scroll and swipe handlers to prevent animation bubbles as well as scroll bottlenecks, but we'll have a look at that later.

String Properties

See Text Plugin for details.

Other Properties

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Did We Miss Any Important Property?

Make sure you go to the issues tracker and report the missing property ASAP, or you can check the extend guide and learn how to develop a plugin to support a new property yourself.