dojo.animateProperty should not require and HTMLElement to work

[guest]

Currently the dojo.animateProperty provides a GREAT framework to do any kind of animation. It should be de-coupled from working only with HTMLElements. For example if I want to simply animate the increment of a user inputted number, I need to currently provide a dummy div so that the property animation works.

var start = dojo.byId("start").value; //previous value
var end = dojo.byId("end").value; //user inputted value
dojo.animateProperty({ node:document.createElement("div"), //dummy div
                       properties:{ value:{ start:start, end:end } }, 
                       onAnimate:function() { dojo.byId("anim").innerHTML = parseFloat(arguments[0].value) } }).play();

It would be great to not at all provide the dummy div, but just do property animation.

Also currently the arguments[0].value returns <value>px. If there is no node provided, the 'px' could be excluded.

[guest]

Application showing current animateProperty usage

[Bryan Forbes]

Deferring to 1.0 since this is an enhancement and we're in a freeze.

[Bryan Forbes]

I don't think that this is a valid enhancement. animateProperty works on CSS properties, not node properties. You probably just want to use a dojo._Animation with a dojo._Line.

[guest]

Cool. Thanks for the hint. Here's the updated code:

var start = parseFloat(dojo.byId("start").value);
var end = parseFloat(dojo.byId("end").value);
var anim = new dojo._Animation({curve:new dojo._Line(start, end),
                                onAnimate:function() { console.log(arguments[0]); } }).play();

One thing to note, you should make sure that the start & end values are numerical. I noticed that if I didn't have the 'parseFloat', it appended a '0'.