When writing of the hypnotic spiral demo the issue appeared that I wanted to use CSS animation when possible but have a fallback to rotate an element. As I didn’t want to rely on CSS animation I also considered it pointless to write it by hand but instead create it with JavaScript when the browser supports it. Here’s how that is done.

Testing for the support of animations means testing if the style attribute is supported:

var animation = false,
    animationstring = 'animation',
    keyframeprefix = '',
    domPrefixes = 'Webkit Moz O ms Khtml'.split(' '),
    pfx  = '';

if( elm.style.animationName ) { animation = true; }

if( animation === false ) {
  for( var i = 0; i < domPrefixes.length; i++ ) {
    if( elm.style[ domPrefixes[i] + 'AnimationName' ] !== undefined ) {
      pfx = domPrefixes[ i ];
      animationstring = pfx + 'Animation';
      keyframeprefix = '-' + pfx.toLowerCase() + '-';
      animation = true;
      break;
    }
  }
}

[Update - the earlier code did not check if the browser supports animation without a prefix - this one does]

This checks if the browser supports animation without any prefixes. If it does, the animation string will be 'animation' and there is no need for any keyframe prefixes. If it doesn't then we go through all the browser prefixes (to date :)) and check if there is a property on the style collection called browser prefix + AnimationName. If there is, the loop exits and we define the right animation string and keyframe prefix and set animation to true. On Firefox this will result in MozAnimation and -moz- and on Chrome in WebkitAnimation and -webkit- so on. This we can then use to create a new CSS animation in JavaScript. If none of the prefix checks return a supported style property we animate in an alternative fashion.

if( animation === false ) {

  // animate in JavaScript fallback

} else {
  elm.style[ animationstring ] = 'rotate 1s linear infinite';

  var keyframes = '@' + keyframeprefix + 'keyframes rotate { '+
                    'from {' + keyframeprefix + 'transform:rotate( 0deg ) }'+
                    'to {' + keyframeprefix + 'transform:rotate( 360deg ) }'+
                  '}';

  if( document.styleSheets && document.styleSheets.length ) {

      document.styleSheets[0].insertRule( keyframes, 0 );

  } else {

    var s = document.createElement( 'style' );
    s.innerHTML = keyframes;
    document.getElementsByTagName( 'head' )[ 0 ].appendChild( s );

  }

}

With the animation string defined we can set a (shortcut notation) animation on our element. Now, adding the keyframes is trickier. As they are not part of the original Animation but disconnected from it in the CSS syntax (to give them more flexibility and allow re-use) we can't set them in JavaScript. Instead we need to write them out as a CSS string.

If there is already a style sheet applied to the document we add this keyframe definition string to that one, if there isn't a style sheet available we create a new style block with our keyframe and add it to the document.

You can see the detection in action and a fallback JavaScript solution on JSFiddle:

JSFiddle demo.

Quite simple, but also a bit more complex than I originally thought. You can also dynamically detect and change current animations as this post by Wayne Pan and this demo by Joe Lambert explains but this also seems quite verbose.

I'd love to have a CSSAnimations collection for example where you could store different animations in JSON or as a string and have their name as the key. Right now, creating a new rule dynamically and adding it either to the document or append it to the ruleset seems to be the only cross-browser way. Thoughts?