Tw-fade: pure CSS scroll-driven edge masking

(pete.design)

48 points | by petekp 3 days ago

9 comments

  • chrismorgan 1 hour ago

    The fade affects scroll bars, which is quite unpleasant (and arguably catastrophic if you have two-dimensional scrolling). The traditional background-image technique avoided this by sitting inside the scroll area. I don’t think you can achieve that with mask, without an additional element. But I think it might be worth that extra element.

    • Stitch4223 31 minutes ago

      What is happening here and why is it special? The site itself does show, but does not tell (which in itself is somewhat refreshing).

      • petekp 3 days ago

        hey all, just released a plugin to scratch an itch. i'd been lazily adding linear gradients on the edges of scrollviews and animating them with JS based on scroll position. turns out you can do a lot better with pure CSS now by leveraging masking + the new CSS scroll animations API.

        works in pretty much all browers excepting firefox which doesn't have CSS scroll animations yet, but the nightly version does, so it should be generally available soon.

        demo site: https://pete.design/tw-fade

        github: https://github.com/petekp/tw-fade

        npmjs: https://www.npmjs.com/package/tw-fade

        if you use it i'd love to hear how it goes and if you have any feedback.

        • Hugsbox 2 hours ago

          This is extremely laggy on my computer. It may not be a top-end gaming supercomputer but it's no slouch either.

          • esperent 26 minutes ago

            It's fine on my phone, Brave Android. Maybe it doesn't work on Firefox?

            • sheept 1 hour ago

              It might be related to the liquid glass imitation in the color scheme picker

              • bduffany 34 minutes ago

                I think you're right. Performance profile shows lots of long spans relating to that element, and deleting that element makes the page scroll much more smoothly.

                There are still other issues though. The performance of this page feels pretty bad in general.

            • thebiblelover7 25 minutes ago
              • maxjustus 1 hour ago

                I also love the pure CSS parallax effect of the "tw-fade" title shadow using multiple spans with different styles that fade in and out based on scroll position. Very clever!

                • jstanley 2 hours ago

                  FYI scrolling this page is slow as balls on my computer. Firefox on Ubuntu.

                  I don't know if this page is a demonstration of your plugin, I'm guessing yes but I can't see any masking going on, it seems to scroll just like a normal page but much more laggy.

                  EDIT: Oh I see in your comment now, it doesn't work in Firefox. My mistake.

                  • RyanOD 1 hour ago

                    I was wondering the same thing and I'm in Chrome. The "Horizontal" and "Vertical" sections don't seem to do anything, but maybe I'm just not understanding what I should be looking for?

                    • rtrigoso 2 hours ago

                      This has a frame drop issue on Chrome Version 149.0.7827.156. It isn't close to smooth on my browser.

                    • ptak 1 hour ago

                      Neat! I'd much rather just copy-paste the CSS from the site though, would never install something like this as a package.

                    • NooneAtAll3 2 hours ago

                      arrow keys don't work, pgdown doesn't work

                      • c-hendricks 1 hour ago

                        I don't think that would be an issue of this CSS, that's just normal `overflow: auto` behaviour.

                        • k33n 2 hours ago

                          pgdown works for me (firefox on linux)

                          arrow keys also seem to work fine but you have to click-to-focus first.