Rubenerd

Be afraid, be very very afraid!

You get me my Cheez Whiz, boy?

Along with all that sweet, sweet syntactic sugar that HTML5 gives us and cool properties in CSS3 like border-radius, I've been aware of a part of the CSS3 specification that has me more terrified than the days when I had to endure the <marquee> tag.

I'm talking of transition effects, and depending on your flavour of browser you call it in one of these ways:

transition-duration: 0.40s;
transition-timing-function: ease-out;
-khtml-transition-duration: 0.40s;
-khtml-transition-timing-function: ease-out;
-moz-transition-duration: 0.40s;
-moz-transition-timing-function: ease-out;
-o-transition-duration: 0.40s;
-o-transition-timing-function: ease-out;
-webkit-transition-duration: 0.40s;
-webkit-transition-timing-function: ease-out;

I can already see this being abused by script kiddies and people on sites like Tumblr using this to death. TO DEATH. When this become mainstream, there will be parts of the net that will be unbearable to use again. Not to say with gratuitous animated gifs and JavaScript they're not doing this, but still!

Save us!

Giorgio Maone over at NoScript has taken it upon himself to modify the plugin of late to help protect us from lots of elements rather than just automatically loaded JS. His extension made Firefox the first browser to respect the proposed DNT opt outs before Mozilla, Apple, Google and Microsoft had. It helps to prevents XSS attacks and in a pinch can block content being automatically loaded in with HTML5's <video> and <audio> tags. More than any other browser or browser extension, NoScript quite literally makes the net usable.

I'm sure Giorgio could block transitions and timing effects too, just so we don't have to go into our preferences files and manually add overrides. As I said, he's done a great job proactively including new features to guard against threats, and I believe gratuitous use of these transitions could be the greatest threat to our collective sanity since Windows Aero and hip hop.

Good grief I'm nearly 25, but this post makes me sound like I'm in my 70s. Hey you kids, get off my lawn!

Thanks to はしりべ (member 1790437) on Pixiv ;).