Drive the animated CSS car down the SVG road

CSS beat straight HTML because CSS lets browsers actually do something. Instead of producing a static grid, like crudely bitmapped page, CSS sends a some chunks of instruction to the browser: take this, then do something to it. Replacing description with instruction is at the heart of modern computing, but (as web developers especially know) not all technologies have caught up.

Bitmapped images, for example, are notoriously old-fashioned. They just identify which dots to light, and how. Vector graphics are, in a sense, the opposite -- the object itself is represented by a mathematical formula -- but the formula is still a (much-simplified) description. SVG files are written, after all, in a markup language (however eXtensible).

Now CSS animations meld the markup and more complex instruction by letting the browser do a lot more dynamic work. And we've definitely seen some awesome CSS3 animation lately.

But today, another step along the path of instruction: a sweet new CSS animation along a path at constant speed.

Here's what you get:

SVG path on the left, CSS on the right, results on the bottom. Unlike my antiquarian bitmap, the real thing shows the little car running around the (SVG) star.

And the code is all quite simple (if a little tedious for sorta-right-brainers like me).

Experiment with the paths and peruse the code here.