webkitAnimationDelay

WebkitAnimationDelay is a CSS property that specifies a delay before an animation starts. It allows developers to control when a particular animation sequence begins, enabling more complex and synchronized animation effects. The value of WebkitAnimationDelay can be a time value, such as seconds (s) or milliseconds (ms), or it can be set to 'infinite' if the animation is intended to repeat indefinitely from the start without any delay between iterations.

When an animation is applied to an element, WebkitAnimationDelay dictates how long the browser will wait after the animation is supposed to begin before actually rendering the first keyframe. This is particularly useful for sequencing animations, where one animation might need to wait for another to complete before it can start. For instance, you could have a series of elements animate in one after another by giving each element an increasing WebkitAnimationDelay value.

The property is part of the wider CSS Animations specification, with the 'webkit' prefix indicating its initial, non-standard implementation in WebKit-based browsers. While most modern browsers now support the standard 'animation-delay' property, 'webkitAnimationDelay' might still be encountered in older codebases for compatibility. The syntax is straightforward: for example, webkitAnimationDelay: 2s; would delay the animation by two seconds. A negative value will cause the animation to start as if it had already begun playing for that duration, effectively skipping the initial part of the animation.