Animation: playState property
Baseline Widely available
This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since March 2020.
The read-only Animation.playState
property of the Web Animations API returns an enumerated value describing the playback state of an animation.
Value
idle
-
The current time of the animation is unresolved and there are no pending tasks.
running
-
The animation is running.
paused
-
The animation was suspended and the
Animation.currentTime
property is not updating. finished
-
The animation has reached one of its boundaries and the
Animation.currentTime
property is not updating.
Previously, Web Animations defined a pending
value to indicate that some asynchronous operation such as initiating playback was yet to complete. This is now indicated by the separate Animation.pending
property.
Examples
In the Growing/Shrinking Alice Game example, players can get an ending with Alice crying into a pool of tears. In the game, for performance reasons, the tears should only be animating when they're visible. So they must be paused as soon as they are animated like so:
// Setting up the tear animations
tears.forEach((el) => {
el.animate(tearsFalling, {
delay: getRandomMsRange(-1000, 1000), // randomized for each tear
duration: getRandomMsRange(2000, 6000), // randomized for each tear
iterations: Infinity,
easing: "cubic-bezier(0.6, 0.04, 0.98, 0.335)",
});
el.pause();
});
// Play the tears falling when the ending needs to be shown.
tears.forEach((el) => {
el.play();
});
// Reset the crying tears animations and pause them.
tears.forEach((el) => {
el.pause();
el.currentTime = 0;
});
Specifications
Specification |
---|
Web Animations # dom-animation-playstate |
Browser compatibility
BCD tables only load in the browser
See also
- Web Animations API
Animation
for other methods and properties you can use to control web page animation.