🔙 The Turn-Signal
The <TurnSignal /> component makes directional transition work with native cross-document view transitions! Continue to use transition:animate directives to define your animations or use the :active-view-transition-type(backward){} to support different view transition animations for the same page!
Contents
Why should I use this component?
Love Astro’s built-in slide animation and Astro’s support for custom animation with different animations for forward and backward navigation? When you replace <ViewTransitions /> with @view-transition{navigation: auto} to enable the browser’s native cross-document view transition all transitions will be ‘forward’. The <TurnSignal /> re-enables the backward animations supported by transition:animate.
The component also automatically sets view transition types for forward, same, and backward and allows you to select among multiple view transition animations for the same page using :active-view-transition-type(<direction>){}. See the description on @vtbag↗ for more details.
If you have a concept of a next and previous page for your site, you can tell the <TurnSignal /> about the order of your pages and it will automatically generate directional view transitions for you.
Usage
Install astro-vtbot in your project as an Astro integration with npx astro add astro-vtbot or as a node package with npm install astro-vtbot.
You need to place the <TurnSignal /> in the <head> of all the pages that you want to navigate with native cross-document view transitions. It’s best to insert the component in your basic layout inside the <head> element.
---import TurnSignal from 'astro-vtbot/components/TurnSignal.astro';---<html> <head> <TurnSignal /> ... </head> ...</html>Properties
The component supports three properties which are all optional. You need to set the selector property if you want support for previous and next page navigation, and you can force page visits to be replaced with history traversals for pages visited earlier.
| Property | Type | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| selector | a CSS selector | If you want to tell <TurnSignal /> about your previous and next page relation for automatically generation of according transition directions, select <a href=...> elements that tell the component about your site’s pages and their order. For example, if you have a navigation bar with a <nav> element that contains links to all pages, a possible selector could be selector="nav a". You can select arbitrary elements as long as they have a href attribute. If your page does not have the required information in a ready to use way, you can add it in a non obstructive way, e.g. inside a <template> element or as <link> elements with some made up rel attribute. |
| forcedTraversal | boolean | This one is a bit debatable as you mess with the users browser history. But the effect may come handy in some situations: Add this attribute and all navigation to pages visited earlier will be replaced by forward or backward history traversals to that page. The users history will never contain a page more than once. |
| directionTypes | backward-value, same-value, forward-value | With this property you can specify how the <TurnSignal /> should signal the direction with view transition types for your CSS to react on. Empty values will be ignored. The default is “backward, same, forward”. As an alternative example you could set directionTypes="reverse,," to only set the reverse type and only for backward navigation. |
| directionAttribute | attribute-name, backward-value, same-value, forward-value | With this property you can specify how the <TurnSignal /> should signal the direction with an HTML attribute for your CSS to react on. Empty values will be ignored. The attribute is set on the document’s <html> element. If defined, the attribute is used in addition to the view transition types. The default is directionAttribute="data-astro-transition, back, , forward" as this mirrors the behavior of Astro’s <ViewTransition> component and is required for the use with transition:animate directives. You can disable the use of the attribute with directionAttribute="" |