How many times have you seen animated sites using Flash? OK, a fair few. I'll also bet that you wanted to skip the animation as soon as you could, right?

Yep, I thought so; not many hands going down now…

We cannot forget the bad old days of sites that used Flash, where we frequently wanted to skip badly designed animations, which often didn't provide any useful content but instead made sites slow. Sounds familiar?

Thankfully, things have moved on; over the next few pages, we'll see how you can use CSS3 animations instead to achieve the same effects that otherwise would have required Flash. The use of CSS3 animations eliminates the need for a heavy Flash plugin (for modern browsers), and provided they are done properly, can make a site faster, more enjoyable to browse, and engaging to the end user. We'll delve into the use of Less to simplify the process of coding some real-world examples in order to make our development workflow much easier.

In this chapter, we...