Very impressive CSS3 demo: CSS3 Planetarium

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/03/css3-planetarium/

by thankuz • 15 years ago

132 59 15 years ago

hacks.mozilla.org

jarin• 15 years ago

Looks very nice, reminds me of the Elements app for iPad.

P.S. I don't know about you guys, but it still bugs me whenever I don't see Pluto.

nkassis• 15 years ago

and the ton of other ice dwarfs in the far end of the solar system? Let it rest. Pluto is the first of a new class.

Uchikoma• 15 years ago

Bugged me too.

checker• 15 years ago

The article points it out, but the text comes in from different directions depending on whether you're clicking on the planet or scrolling to it from the side.

Nice touch.

stevelosh• 15 years ago

And here's what it looks like in IE9: http://twitpic.com/4a3kyw/full

mrspandex• 15 years ago

Also doesn't work in FF 3.6 or Opera 11...

leftnode• 15 years ago

They weren't just released yesterday...

gkoberger• 15 years ago

It's a Firefox 4 demo site, so 3.6 isn't supported. It should, however, work on most modern browsers.

rkalla• 15 years ago

I still read this word as "Planeh-arium" in my head. Maybe a bad reference :)

micheljansen• 15 years ago

It looks awesome on Chrome, but there is a slight glitch in the shape of a flash that occurs once all animation appears to have finished. Anyone else experiencing this?

Griever• 15 years ago

On Chrome Dev 11.0.696.12 and I'm experiencing the same thing. Seems like a minor complaint though as the rest of the site works flawlessly.

J3L2404• 15 years ago

Crashes Safari on iPad iOS 4.3

[EDIT] On iPad 1.

gnok• 15 years ago

It rendered somewhat incorrectly for me, but it was smooth and didn't crash. I'm on Safari on iPad 2 iOS 4.3.

crowdcs• 15 years ago

I let out a sigh when I saw redundant but understandably necessary function calls to support all browsers. Is there hope in seeing stuff like this consolidated anytime soon? -moz-transform:... -webkit-transform:... -o-transform:... transform:...

grayrest2• 15 years ago

Not really. The prefixes allow vendors to do experimental stuff without creating (as much) of a backwards compatiblity problem before things standardize. If you don't like it, use a preprocessor:

* http://sass-lang.com/ * http://lesscss.org/ * http://learnboost.github.com/stylus/

The last one is the most promising since it can be made to look exactly like standard css, but it's really rough right now.

nathos• 15 years ago

Sass, at least with its default SCSS syntax, is a strict superset of CSS3 so it's a good place to start. Your existing CSS files can be processed by Sass without changes.

Combined with some of the great mixins provided with Compass: http://beta.compass-style.org/reference/compass/css3/transfo..., you can eliminate many of the vendor specific declarations.

bzbarsky5• 15 years ago

Yes, once transforms enter CR.

Note, by the way, that right now -moz-transform and -webkit-transform have different syntax, so "consolidation" involves deciding which syntax to standardize on.

rheide• 15 years ago

I feel sorry for Pluto :(

cosgroveb• 15 years ago

It says Mt. Everest is 8848KM tall... I believe that should be Meters.

mconnors4• 15 years ago

Something you can make in flash in like 10 minutes- and it works on everything ( not mobile ).

mconnors4• 15 years ago

can't bury that which is true.

kenjackson3• 15 years ago

Pretty cheap downvotes you're getting here. Wish I could upvote you more than once.

richbradshaw• 15 years ago

We might as well just drop the whole idea of HTML, JS and CSS and just use 3rd party plugins to replace the whole thing. That totally makes sense. Innovation is for idiots.

kenjackson3• 15 years ago

First, innovation doesn't only happen in a single application and runtime (the browser). Flash has innovated as much as FF4 has. It's weird that the distribution model for the runtime defines what is innovation and what isn't. A runtime that is distributed as a plugin is inherently not innovative, while one that is a monolithic application is. Go figure.

And I think the point of the original poster isn't that we should drop HTML. But rather that this application isn't cool on first principles. You can show this same app to your child as a Flash app and your child should be just as impressed. It's a good work for HTML, but as far as applications distributed by a web server it isn't especially innovative. But we should keep working on HTHML/JS/CSS as it will get better.

mconnors4• 15 years ago

The only "innovative" thing about this is- its not flash. The reason its not flash is because front end developers, hate flash with a passion that borders, frothing at the mouth psychosis. They hate flash because very simply it takes work off of their desk. At the end of the day, a client still won't want to pay twice as much for something that works on half of modern browsers when in reality his high school kid could have done it in 10 minutes with flash, (unless its for mobile). Its the same stupid argument I've heard for the past 10 years, but the difference today is mobile platforms won't support flash (or it just sucks on mobile) and there is finally an opportunity to kill flash. That pretty much sums it up. Haters will hate, client will still pay for flash, flash sucks on mobile, lame slide shows are not innovative.

ceejayoz• 15 years ago

That's an interesting definition of "everything" you have there.

syaz12• 15 years ago

The only thing I can relate 'everything' with Flash is that everything spikes up. Seeing this demo I noticed no big spikes on CPU, etc.

mconnors4• 15 years ago

Well I guess you won't get spikes on any version of IE since that can't even display it.

emehrkay• 15 years ago

My son has to see this

splatcollision• 15 years ago

Good stuff. Github page is here: http://github.com/littleworkshop/planetarium

mrspeaker• 15 years ago

That is really awesome - but one thing (which is just an observation, not a complaint) I've noticed with all the CSS3 super-cool demos like this is that everything is very "linear". All the animation stuff happens in straight lines or repeating patterns (of circles, in the demo) which gives the page a certain feel.

I wonder if it's the start of an effect that will eventually be used to carbon-date websites... "Ah look at this specimen - table based layout, and JavaScript littered with variable names beginning with "mm_" from the late Dreamweaver era. Oooh, now look here... completely linear animations... my guess is it's early 2011! And in such condition!"

Groxx• 15 years ago

That's interesting... I don't know if it's possible to animate directly on a bezier curve, though that'd be an extremely-useful thing to be able to do.

It looks like all the animatable properties just have ease-in / out timing, and go from A to B. Given that, the best you could do is animate each X/Y direction's behavior, creating a new animation at each bezier curve point, and using the bezier form of the timing function to mimic curved paths.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/css/css_transitions and https://developer.mozilla.org/en/css/css_transitions

bzbarsky5• 15 years ago

The timing function can be an arbitrary cubic bezier; some common ones like ease-in/out and so forth have dedicated keywords.

You should be able to get arbitrary bezier paths if you pick your x and y timing beziers carefully, I'd think... But it does take some thinking.

arnorhs• 15 years ago

Not all the transitions are linear. In the cases where they are, it's obviously a design choice.

It might be that because they're moving fast that you perceive it that way. But most of the animations have easing. Ease in and out on almost all the animation styles.

http://mozillademos.org/demos/planetarium/css/style.css

ch0wn• 15 years ago

It works perfectly fine in Chrome, but runs very sluggish compared to FF4. Does anyone know which particular part is so much faster in Firefox?

robertk• 15 years ago

Apparently both Earth and Mercury are the densest planets in the solar system...

baddox• 15 years ago

While that's certainly possible (if they had the same density and no planet was more dense), it's more likely a copy and paste error.

InclinedPlane• 15 years ago

Earth has a higher density than Mercury (5.52 vs 5.43 g/cm^3).

nborgo• 15 years ago

Moving the left and right arrows with the cursor is a great idea, especially since they don't move until you get close. It might be nicer if they would animate to the position when you first move the cursor over, though. It's kind of jumpy as is.

That pattern just might catch on.

syaz12• 15 years ago

There's a bug though. If you click on first/last planet then the arrow will not appear at all. Naturally you expect right arrow when clicking the first planet. Vice versa.

franck2• 15 years ago

Developer here.

We are glad that many of you found our demo interesting. The point was to explore how we could apply some new browser features to present educational content in an interactive/immersive way.

Sorry about Pluto fans – we were also sad not to include it. We should have put it as an easter egg!

Thanks to people who reported typo/content errors.

We cannot fix them right now though – because we have no control over Mozilla's site. We'll push an update when we get the chance.

isleyaardvark• 15 years ago

Ok, can I gripe about the text that says this about Saturn: "Despite its size (9.4 Earths)..."? While the diameter is 9.4 times that of Earth, the size of Saturn is way larger than 9 individual Earths. Volume-wise you could fit 764 Earths inside Saturn, and that would be a more appropriate metric. The weird hexagon storm on Saturn alone is the size of 4 Earths.

estel• 15 years ago

It does seem a bit odd that all three major browser vendors are able to release interesting web-apps that only run at full-speed in their own browsers. Do they intentionally exploit some exclusive feature to show the other browsers up?

franck2• 15 years ago

There was not any attempt to make it run faster in Firefox 4. The goal is to showcase the Web as a platform and its possibilities. There is clearly no point in making it run well only in one browser.

Besides, we developed this demo on OSX, where performance is comparable among all three supported browsers.

bzbarsky5• 15 years ago

The ordering is sometimes the other way. You write the stuff you think is interesting, discover that you're not as fast as you'd like on it, fix whatever performance bugs you find.

Though in this case the demo was actually written after Firefox 4 development was frozen. So the fact that it's particularly fast in Firefox on Windows just has to do with hardware acceleration, nothing else.

kpozin• 15 years ago

Works very well in Chrome 10.0 beta, barely runs in Firefox 4 RC1 on the same machine. Oh, the irony.

sho_hn• 15 years ago

One thing I notice is that I can't select most of the text. I'd like HTML sites to do better than Flash in this regard -- conformance to established HTML behavior is supposed to be an advantage.

bzbarsky5• 15 years ago

This looks like a purposeful action by the page: it calls preventDefault on mousedown events for some reason. :(

pluto• 15 years ago

Hmpfh.

sorbus• 15 years ago

Ah, novelty accounts. Could we please keep those to reddit, if you don't mind?

kevingadd• 15 years ago

Works perfectly in the latest mobile build of firefox (albeit slowly), which is a pleasant surprise - I expected it not to. Alas, for some reason the stock android browser can't even finish loading it.

necolas• 15 years ago

Really impressive, but it's a shame that this is being labelled "CSS3" or "HTML5" when clearly it relies on a lot of JavaScript. It's a great example of weaving several front-end technologies together...and there should be nothing wrong with saying so.

duck• 15 years ago

Very cool, but on every planet I wanted to be able to spin it on it's axis. That would be a demo.

Very impressive CSS3 demo: CSS3 Planetarium

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