Detect Pseudo-Element Animation Support

A while back I posted an interesting tidbit from Daniel Buchner which allows developers to detect DOM node insertions with JavaScript and CSS animations; an awesome trick driven by CSS animations.  Lea Verou recently posted another detection snippet driven by CSS animations:  detecting pseudo-element animation support.  Here's how she did it!

The CSS

The test case can use any pseudo-element; in this case we'll use :before:

/**
 * Animation on pseudo-elements test
 */
@keyframes color { from,to { color: rgb(0, 255, 0); } }

.testElement:before {
	content: '(...testing animation support...)';
	color: rgb(255, 0, 0);
	animation: color 1s infinite;
	-webkit-animation: color 1s infinite;
}

A simple color animation is assigned to the pseudo-element and a spot-check of generated content will tell you if animation is supported (green) or not (red).  At the time of this post, only Firefox and Chrome support animation of psuedo-elements.

JavaScript Detection

Thanks to a tip from Ahmed El Gabri, I can present a method to detect pseudo-element animation:

var color = window.getComputedStyle(
	document.querySelector('.testElement'), ':before'
).getPropertyValue('color')

if(color == 'rgb(0, 255, 0)') {
	// Supported! :)
}

The same principal applies; if the color is green, the animation worked. A JavaScript method of feature detection makes everything better!

Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a JavaScript method for testing generated content properties, so a spot check appears to be all we can rely on at this point.  Hopefully someone clever out there can figure out an efficient way to get the test result! Having a reliable method for detecting pseudo-element animation is excellent; another tool to add to the arsenal!