Animation.playState

The Animation.playState property of the Web Animations API returns and sets an enumerated value describing the playback state of an animation.

Syntax

var currentPlayState = Animation.playState;

Animation.playState = newState;

Value

idle

The current time of the animation is unresolved and there are no pending tasks.

pending

The animation is waiting on some pending task to complete.

running

The animation is running.

paused

The animation was suspended and the Animation.currentTime property is not updating.

finished

The animation has reached one of its boundaries and the Animation.currentTime property is not updating.

Example

In the Growing/Shrinking Alice Game example, players can get an ending with Alice crying into a pool of tears. In the game, for performance reasons, the tears should only be animating when they're visible. So they must be paused as soon as they are animated like so:

// Setting up the tear animations

tears.forEach(function(el) {  
  el.animate(
    tearsFalling, 
    {
      delay: getRandomMsRange(-1000, 1000), // randomized for each tear
      duration: getRandomMsRange(2000, 6000), // randomized for each tear
      iterations: Infinity,
      easing: "cubic-bezier(0.6, 0.04, 0.98, 0.335)"
    });
  el.playState = 'paused';
});


// Play the tears falling when the ending needs to be shown. 

tears.forEach(function(el) { 
  el.playState = 'playing'; 
});


// Reset the crying tears animations and pause them.

tears.forEach(function(el) {  
  el.playState = "paused";
  el.currentTime = 0;
});

Specifications

Specification	Status	Comment
Web Animations The definition of 'playState' in that specification.	Working Draft	Initial definition.

Browser compatibility

[1] Before Chrome 50, this attribute showed idle for an animation that had not yet started. Starting with Chrome 50, it shows paused.

[2] The Web Animations API is only enabled by default in Firefox Developer Edition and Nightly builds. You can enable it in beta and release builds by setting the preference dom.animations-api.core.enabled to true, and can disable it in any Firefox version by setting this preference to false.

See also

• Web Animations API
• Animation for other methods and properties you can use to control web page animation.
• The Animation.play(), Animation.pause(), Animation.finish() methods can set an Animation's playState.