Veerle's blog

FACE stands for: Faruk’s Animated CSS Enhancements. It is a technique that combines JavaScript with the flexibility of CSS. It’s a way for designers to create animations without having to know Flash or JavaScript, so you could say that it fits in the world of script.aculo.us and MOOFx.

Faruk Ateş has created this technique together with Tim Hofman and its aim is to ”enhance standards-compliant pages without sacrificing important aspects such as accessibility, scalability and flexibility.” The animations are enabled by the script and controlled by CSS. To be clear its purpose is not to replace Flash or anything but rather as an opportunity to go for when Flash is overkill or when you want something that is more accessible and still works when JavaScript is switched off. A navigation comes to mind because sometimes clients want them animated and before FACE you had to resolve to Flash.

But like with any technology danger looks around the corner with over-animated sites, exactly the things that got Flash a bad name years ago. The outcome of all this will depend on the person who uses it wisely or not. The fact that it requires semantic HTML and CSS for presentation will keep it out of the hand of over enthusiastic hobbyists I guess.

It’s still in beta and Faruk is looking for some feedback on what to implement in Beta 2. To me it looks interesting enough and it has potential to grow so I’ll keep it on my radar.