Monorail – Turn CSS animations into interactive SVG graphs
muffinman.ioHey HN,
I needed a few simple graphs for a blog post [0]. Instead of slapping together a few SVGs and moving on, I decided to write a whole library to parse CSS keyframe animations and convert them to interactive graphs.
It ended up being a rabbit hole, with a lot of caveats. But it was fun to make, and I'm really happy with the graphs it produces.
I'm not sure how useful it will be for others. If you end up using it, I'd love to see how - feel free to reach out.
It's open source [1] under the MIT license. Written in TypeScript with no dependencies.
Let me know what you think!
Cool stuff! Flattening things like colours into a 1D value is an interesting challenge here. How did you decide to weigh the R channel an order of magnitude higher than G and so on? I might've tried working with HSV for instance, since it feels like animations would often be along one of those axes, but maybe not.
Thank you! As for color conversion, I didn’t spend too much time thinking about the conversion. Because I’m using canvas to transform CSS colors to RGBA, I just went and multiplied them in order by powers on 10.
It can definitely be improved. Using HSL or even OKLch would probably give nicer results. I may look into it.
Is that what’s happening with the color? I assumed it was doing (R+G+B)•Opacity, so the max would be 255•3=765 and the min would be 0.
Yeah I dug up the relevant function because I was curious how one would solve this.
https://github.com/Stanko/monorail/blob/2da287a4e822705a99d7...return (r * 1000 + g * 100 + b * 10 + a * 255) / 10000;
Interesting! I had the opposite idea: to convert arbitrary SVG to CSS..
What do you have in mind?
I thought about making all values on the chart draggable. It would then update the CSS animation in realtime. I think would be very cool, but I’m not sure if there is a real usage for something like that, so I haven’t touched it.
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