This is great stuff--bringing OS X's Core Animation technology to web apps.<p>Apple is betting both on the desktop and on the (open standards) web, and letting both compete freely.<p>Microsoft seems to want to cripple IE to prevent web apps from overtaking the desktop (or else they've got some other wierd motivation that cripples its forward motion in areas like CSS standards, 2d/3d canvas, Javascript features/performance; or perhaps they're hoping to make their proprietary Silverlight the chosen method for delivering desktop-like apps.)<p>(Sorry, don't mean to be a fanboi--lots to criticize about Apple's overall behavior, but at least in this area they seem to be thinking right.)
Compared to authoring 3-D any other way, turning parts of the DOM to 3-D is just smart. Built-in textures, text, it's really 5x easier to author this than anything before it.
This will only be interesting if Mozilla and Opera pick it up (which <i>might</i> force MS to pick it up, but nobody can bet on that happening).<p>I don't buy the cloud computing hype, but following browser technology is always fun. Oh, and it's WebKit, so free upvote.
Does anyone else worry that these animations are going to get seriously misused? I know they look pretty cool, but I can definitely see them becoming the post-Web-2.0 blink and marquee tags<p>Also, shouldn't animation be part of Javascript rather than CSS as it's more to do with behaviour rather than presentation?