Scroll-Driven Animation: When Scroll Becomes the Timeline
Opening: treating scroll as “time” When you build scroll-based animations, you eventually hit this thought: “What if scroll were not just an input event” “but a proper timeline?” Scroll-Driven Animation is that idea made explicit. Instead of treating scroll as a trigger, you treat it as the timeline itself. In this post, I group implementation strategies into three families: Native CSS Scroll-Driven Animation IntersectionObserver for state changes scroll + requestAnimationFrame with manual progress mapping For each one, we will cover the principle, strengths, tradeoffs, and accessibility concerns. The code samples here are minimal and correct by themselves, and each section ends with a link to a live demo you can poke at directly. ...