Seems like everyone is gushing that Safari 3.1, bless its little heart, is the first browser to support CSS animations. Whoop-de-doo—web developers can now add animation with a simple CSS tag. JavaScript not necessary! (Swoon!)

Personally, I think this development is dreadful.

You see, right now Safari has only one flaw, and it’s a super-giant-sized one: it does not support plugins and it does not block animations, which means that it merrily displays every infantile animated GIF and Flash ad it encounters.

Other browsers do a very nice job of either allowing you to block animations directly, or of allowing you to install a plugin to do the scrubbing. Safari allows neither, which means that the only medicine available comes in the form of an input manager, such as SIMBL. Input manager hacks carry a lot of baggage with them. For one thing, they try to inject themselves into every launched application, not just Safari. This annoys me greatly when I run a garbage-collected application in the XCode debugger and it clogs the log with statements about every input manager that is trying to inject non-garbage-collected code into my application.

Despite this, I have used PithHelmet for years, because many of the sites I visit regularly contain so much animation noise that I can’t keep my mind focused on the content. But the developer of PithHelmet has grown progressively more lax about updating his product. Safari 3.1? Heck, it doesn’t even block GIF animations in 3.0.

I used to enjoy Joy of Tech back when PithHelmet used to block the animated GIFs that spin the stupid propellors on the stupid beanies (three of them on the same page!). I could contemplate and appreciate the comic illustrations. Now, I try to think about the content but all I see is three spinning propellor beanies that just won’t stop won’t stop dammit to hell they won’t stop jesus what the hell are they thinking I wish the damn things would just STOP!

I used to read The Register before they went anti-Mac a couple years ago. At the time, I thought El Reg was way out in front in loading up the site with Flash animations. Nowadays, I view them as rather tame compared with many others.

Here’s a theorem for you: the usability of a web page is inversely proportional to K times the square of the number of animations it contains, where K is a constant equal to one hundred thousand.

Old timers, do you remember way back in the day when Netscape came up with the blink tag? Every HTML guide you could find proclaimed in urgent tones that the tag must never be used. That is, unless you are building the sleaze row of web pages, as one site put it. That site is worth a quick visit because it displays what those old blink and marquee tags looked like, on the assumption that merely to see animation tags in action is to understand why only an idiot would use them. What’s remarkable is that that page doesn’t look too much different from the Flash-filled pages of today. The blink tag, universally condemned for its intrusive annoyance, pales in comparison with the Flash animation, which compounds annoyance with insipidity. The total annoyance is a product of the square of the animation annoyance with the… oh you get the idea.

By the way, it’s worthwhile noting what Wikipedia says about the blink tag. Pay particular attention to the usability and accessibility issues.

Yep, we old timers all knew that the blink animation was evil. But for reasons I cannot fathom, most people today seem to just put up with other unwanted animations. If you blink something using the blink tag, that’s bad. If you blink something using Flash, that’s OK. Huh?

And now comes Safari 3.1. In a web world increasingly poisoned by tawdry animations of the GIF, JavaScript, and Flash kind, Safari 3.1 brings us—wait for it— another way to do animations!

Say it ain’t so, say it ain’t so.

I can see where CSS animations might be useful on the iPhone (excuse me, in Apple’s lingo, “on iPhone”). Granted. Regarding my desktop, however, I look uneasily toward an incipient web that contains one more animation that Safari won’t block.

When that day comes, maybe I’ll just install Lynx.