In this introductory chapter, we looked at a brief history of animation on the Web including how it began, early HTML elements and browser support, the rise of Flash, and the direction it's heading in the not too distant future.
We also looked at how animations can be used in a user interface to enhance the user experience. We saw some guidelines as to when animation should and shouldn't be used and looked at some of the things we should consider when implementing animations.
We closed the chapter with a basic example looking at a loading animation. In this example, we used the fadeTo() jQuery method to change the opacity of elements on the page, and a simple interval to "play" the animation. We didn't cover the method in full detail, but we saw one example of how it can be used. We'll look at this method in more detail in the next chapter, which covers all of the fading animations provided by jQuery.
