Pure CSS scroll animation

78
votes

I have been looking for a way to scroll down when clicking on a button that is located on top of a page using CSS3 only.

So I've found this tutorial: http://tympanus.net/codrops/2012/06/12/css-only-responsive-layout-with-smooth-transitions/

Demo: http://tympanus.net/Tutorials/SmoothTransitionsResponsiveLayout/

But it's a bit too advanced for my needs since I just want the browser to scroll down on a click on one button located on top of the page, so I was wondering: is it possible to do those CSS scrolls without the input buttons, just with an anchor tag?

HTML looks like this: <a href="#" class="button">Learn more</a>

I have already some CSS which I need to trigger on button click:

/* Button animation tryout. */
.animate {
    animation: moveDown 0.6s ease-in-out 0.2s backwards;
}
@keyframes moveDown{
    0% { 
        transform: translateY(-40px); 
        opacity: 0;
    }
    100% { 
        transform: translateY(0px);  
        opacity: 1;
    }
}
4
cssscrollcss-transitionsanchor
A major drawback of this CSS-based scrolling is that the user can't manually scroll up after using the CSS-based scrolling has scrolled down to a selected element. Seems like a user would intuitively want to do this, given the animated page transition! For me it's back to jQuery's animate({scrollTop:...}). Or did I miss something? – vicmortelmans
With this solution you can fix the inability to go back. Just use this HTML markup: <div parallax="moveDown">...</div> And it will move down as you scroll down and back up as you scroll up... – elixon

4 Answers

122
votes

Use anchor links and the scroll-behavior property (MDN reference) for the scrolling container:

scroll-behavior: smooth;

Browser support: Firefox 36+, Chrome 61+ (therefore also Edge 79+) and Opera 48+.

Intenet Explorer, non-Chromium Edge and (so far) Safari do not support scroll-behavior and simply "jump" to the link target.

Example usage:

<head>
  <style type="text/css">
    html {
      scroll-behavior: smooth;
    }
  </style>
</head>
<body id="body">
  <a href="#foo">Go to foo!</a>

  <!-- Some content -->

  <div id="foo">That's foo.</div>
  <a href="#body">Back to top</a>
</body>

Here's a Fiddle.

And here's also a Fiddle with both horizontal and vertical scrolling.

91
votes

You can do it with anchor tags using css3 :target pseudo-selector, this selector is going to be triggered when the element with the same id as the hash of the current URL get an match. Example

Knowing this, we can combine this technique with the use of proximity selectors like "+" and "~" to select any other element through the target element who id get match with the hash of the current url. An example of this would be something like what you are asking.

-2
votes

You can use my script from CodePen by just wrapping all the content within a .levit-container DIV.

~function  () {
    function Smooth () {
        this.$container = document.querySelector('.levit-container');
        this.$placeholder = document.createElement('div');
    }

    Smooth.prototype.init = function () {
        var instance = this;

        setContainer.call(instance);
        setPlaceholder.call(instance);
        bindEvents.call(instance);
    }

    function bindEvents () {
        window.addEventListener('scroll', handleScroll.bind(this), false);
    }

    function setContainer () {
        var style = this.$container.style;

        style.position = 'fixed';
        style.width = '100%';
        style.top = '0';
        style.left = '0';
        style.transition = '0.5s ease-out';
    }

    function setPlaceholder () {
        var instance = this,
                $container = instance.$container,
                $placeholder = instance.$placeholder;

        $placeholder.setAttribute('class', 'levit-placeholder');
        $placeholder.style.height = $container.offsetHeight + 'px';
        document.body.insertBefore($placeholder, $container);
    }

    function handleScroll () {
        this.$container.style.transform = 'translateZ(0) translateY(' + (window.scrollY * (- 1)) + 'px)';
    }

    var smooth = new Smooth();
    smooth.init();
}();

https://codepen.io/acauamontiel/pen/zxxebb?editors=0010

-3
votes

And for webkit enabled browsers I've had good results with:

.myElement {
    -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;
    scroll-behavior: smooth; // Added in from answer from Felix
    overflow-x: scroll;
}

This makes scrolling behave much more like the standard browser behavior - at least it works well on the iPhone we were testing on!

Hope that helps,

Ed