This is great stuff--bringing OS X's Core Animation technology to web apps.

Apple is betting both on the desktop and on the (open standards) web, and letting both compete freely.

Microsoft seems to want to cripple IE to prevent web apps from overtaking the desktop (or else they've got some other wierd motivation that cripples its forward motion in areas like CSS standards, 2d/3d canvas, Javascript features/performance; or perhaps they're hoping to make their proprietary Silverlight the chosen method for delivering desktop-like apps.)

(Sorry, don't mean to be a fanboi--lots to criticize about Apple's overall behavior, but at least in this area they seem to be thinking right.)

Now we must hope that Microsoft's market share won't force these new features to remain niche. As long as IE retains a lot of market share while not including these new features, the web can only go forward so far.

Compared to authoring 3-D any other way, turning parts of the DOM to 3-D is just smart. Built-in textures, text, it's really 5x easier to author this than anything before it.

This will only be interesting if Mozilla and Opera pick it up (which might force MS to pick it up, but nobody can bet on that happening).

I don't buy the cloud computing hype, but following browser technology is always fun. Oh, and it's WebKit, so free upvote.

Does anyone else worry that these animations are going to get seriously misused? I know they look pretty cool, but I can definitely see them becoming the post-Web-2.0 blink and marquee tags

Also, shouldn't animation be part of Javascript rather than CSS as it's more to do with behaviour rather than presentation?

I'd argue that most simple UI animations are in fact presentational, not behavioral.

One of the nice things about defining animations declaratively in CSS instead of procedurally in Javascript is that browsers will have control over the implementation. Your browser could easily have a "no animations" mode, or selectively disable certain animation types. Browsers can implement animations much more efficiently if they don't have to call Javascript every frame, and they can also separate animation from whatever else the page is doing; animations could be slowed or stopped in background tabs or low-battery situations while the page's Javascript continues running.

Not to mention that it'll do wonders for keeping pages accessible where we'd otherwise risk people making them a mess of javascript...

Fwiw the demo runs great on the iPhone 3GS. Looks like it's at least running at 15fps.

Here's an older CoverFlow iPhone demo: http://css-vfx.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/examples/zflow_snow....

Sweet, animated d-20's.

Oooh, the beautiful web.

I've seen it, and it is beautiful!