Introduction

Goal of the tutorial: This tutorial aims to provide you with the necessary tools to control and manage your animations. We will focus on understanding the animation queue and how to use it to sequence your animations.

What you will learn: By the end of this tutorial, you will be able to create and control animations using the animation queue, understand how to sequence animations, and apply best practices when creating your animations.

Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is required. Familiarity with jQuery would be beneficial as it simplifies working with animations.

Step-by-Step Guide

Animation controls are essential in web development to add interactivity and liveliness to your web pages. In this section, we'll walk you through important animation concepts, provide clear examples, and share best practices.

Animation Queue

The animation queue is a powerful tool in jQuery that allows you to schedule animations on an element. By default, all animations are placed in the "fx" queue and are executed one after another. You can also create your own custom queues.

// animate the element's width over 500ms, then when that's done, animate the height
$("div").animate({width: '50%'}, 500).animate({height: '50%'}, 500);

Controlling Animations

There are several methods to control the animations:

• .stop(): stops the currently running animation.
• .delay(): sets a delay for the next animation in the queue.
• .finish(): stops the currently running animation, removes all remaining animations from the queue, and completes all animations for the element.

Code Examples

Let's look at some practical examples.

Example 1: Using the .stop() Method

<!-- HTML -->
<div id="box" style="height:100px; width:100px; background-color:blue;"></div>
<button id="start">Start</button>
<button id="stop">Stop</button>

// JavaScript
$("#start").click(function(){
  $("#box").animate({height: '300px'}, 2000);
});

$("#stop").click(function(){
  $("#box").stop();
});

In the above example, the 'Start' button will start the animation and the 'Stop' button will stop the animation.

Example 2: Using the .delay() Method

<!-- HTML -->
<div id="box" style="height:100px; width:100px; background-color:red;"></div>

// JavaScript
$("#box").animate({height: '300px'}, 2000).delay(1000).animate({width: '300px'}, 2000);

Here, the animation will increase the height of the box, wait for 1 second (1000 milliseconds), and then increase the width.

Summary

In this tutorial, you learned how to use the animation queue to control and sequence your animations, stop animations, delay animations, and finish animations. The next step would be to explore jQuery's other animation methods like fadeIn, fadeOut, slideToggle, etc.

Practice Exercises

1. Create a box that increases in size when a button is clicked and returns to its original size when another button is clicked.
2. Create an animation sequence that changes a box's color, moves it across the screen, and then fades it out. Use the .delay() method to pause between each step.

Solutions

1. Here's a solution for the first exercise:
   ```html
   

Grow
Shrink
javascript
// JavaScript
$("#grow").click(function(){
$("#box").animate({height: '300px', width: '300px'}, 2000);
});

$("#shrink").click(function(){
$("#box").animate({height: '100px', width: '100px'}, 2000);
});
2. Here's a solution for the second exercise:html

Start
javascript
// JavaScript
$("#start").click(function(){
$("#box").animate({backgroundColor: 'red'}, 2000)
.delay(1000)
.animate({left: '500px'}, 2000)
.delay(1000)
.fadeOut(2000);
});
```