Intent to Ship: CSS Image Animation

[Chromestatus]

Contact emails

seo...@chromium.org, sche...@chromium.org

Explainer

https://drafts.csswg.org/css-image-animation-1/explainer

Specification

https://drafts.csswg.org/css-image-animation-1

Summary

Introduces a new CSS property and pseudo-class to control and detect animated images like GIFs and APNGs. 1. image-animation: Can be set to "normal", "running", or "paused" to control image animation playback. 2. :animated-image: A pseudo-class to determine whether an image is animated.

Blink component

Blink>CSS

Web Feature ID

Missing feature

Motivation

Currently, user agents autoplay animated images (e.g., GIF, WebP, PNG) by default. This behavior can be violate accessibility standards regarding pausing and stopping content. Site authors currently lack mechanisms to control this playback. The only existing methods are browser-specific global settings, which are inconsistent and lack the features needed for developers to build accessible, per-image playback interfaces.

Initial public proposal

https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1615

TAG review

https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/1237

TAG review status

Pending

Goals for experimentation

None

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility

No information provided

Gecko: No signal (https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1421)

WebKit: No signal (https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/685)

Web developers: No signals

Other signals:

WebView application risks

Does this intent deprecate or change behavior of existing APIs, such that it has potentially high risk for Android WebView-based applications?

No information provided

Debuggability

No information provided

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and Android WebView)?

Yes

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?

Yes

Flag name on about://flags

No information provided

Finch feature name

CSSImageAnimation

Rollout plan

Will ship enabled for all users

Requires code in //chrome?

False

Tracking bug

https://issues.chromium.org/u/2/issues/429459566

Estimated milestones

Shipping on desktop	152
Shipping on Android	152
Shipping on WebView	152

Anticipated spec changes

Open questions about a feature may be a source of future web compat or interop issues. Please list open issues (e.g. links to known github issues in the project for the feature specification) whose resolution may introduce web compat/interop risk (e.g., changing to naming or structure of the API in a non-backward-compatible way).

No information provided

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status

https://chromestatus.com/feature/5078177326170112?gate=6503444473053184

Links to previous Intent discussions

Intent to Prototype: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/6968a079.050a0220.307fc3.04ef.GAE%40google.com

This intent message was generated by Chrome Platform Status.

[Ian Kilpatrick]

Did this concern get address in the spec?

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[Yoav Weiss (@Shopify)]

On Friday, June 26, 2026 at 5:41:14 PM UTC+2 Chromestatus wrote:

Contact emails

seo...@chromium.org, sche...@chromium.org

Explainer

https://drafts.csswg.org/css-image-animation-1/explainer

Specification

https://drafts.csswg.org/css-image-animation-1

Summary

Introduces a new CSS property and pseudo-class to control and detect animated images like GIFs and APNGs. 1. image-animation: Can be set to "normal", "running", or "paused" to control image animation playback. 2. :animated-image: A pseudo-class to determine whether an image is animated.

Blink component

Blink>CSS

Web Feature ID

Missing feature

Motivation

Currently, user agents autoplay animated images (e.g., GIF, WebP, PNG) by default. This behavior can be violate accessibility standards regarding pausing and stopping content. Site authors currently lack mechanisms to control this playback. The only existing methods are browser-specific global settings, which are inconsistent and lack the features needed for developers to build accessible, per-image playback interfaces.

Initial public proposal

https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1615

TAG review

https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/1237

It seems worthwhile to give the TAG time to review this thoroughly.
The arguments in Provide this as a UA Setting don't clearly outline why e.g. image annotation (as "decorative" vs. "content") wouldn't have enabled UA settings to better solve this problem.
It seems like this solution to a use a11y problem will depend on developers doing the right (and highly complex) thing, which feels.. risky

 

[Yoav Weiss (@Shopify)]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2026 at 2:22 PM Yoav Weiss (@Shopify) <yoav...@chromium.org> wrote:

On Friday, June 26, 2026 at 5:41:14 PM UTC+2 Chromestatus wrote:

Contact emails

seo...@chromium.org, sche...@chromium.org

Explainer

https://drafts.csswg.org/css-image-animation-1/explainer

Specification

https://drafts.csswg.org/css-image-animation-1

Summary

Introduces a new CSS property and pseudo-class to control and detect animated images like GIFs and APNGs. 1. image-animation: Can be set to "normal", "running", or "paused" to control image animation playback. 2. :animated-image: A pseudo-class to determine whether an image is animated.

Blink component

Blink>CSS

Web Feature ID

Missing feature

Motivation

Currently, user agents autoplay animated images (e.g., GIF, WebP, PNG) by default. This behavior can be violate accessibility standards regarding pausing and stopping content. Site authors currently lack mechanisms to control this playback. The only existing methods are browser-specific global settings, which are inconsistent and lack the features needed for developers to build accessible, per-image playback interfaces.

Initial public proposal

https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1615

TAG review

https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/1237

It seems worthwhile to give the TAG time to review this thoroughly.
The arguments in Provide this as a UA Setting don't clearly outline why e.g. image annotation (as "decorative" vs. "content") wouldn't have enabled UA settings to better solve this problem.
It seems like this solution to a use a11y problem will depend on developers doing the right (and highly complex) thing, which feels.. risky

* "user a11y problem" 

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[Seokho Song]

+CC Florian, the spec writer. 

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