Framer Motion and the "Magic" of CSS Fundamentals

#webdev #css #framermotion #learning

I’ve been using Framer Motion for the rewrite of my portfolio site lately, and honestly? It’s been such a treat!

My old site was built with the "old school" stack: HTML, CSS, vanilla JavaScript, and a dash of PHP for interactivity. You kids these days on my lawn don't know how lucky you have it! These incredible animation libraries are a fun, fast way to add high-end polish to your applications or websites.

But don’t be fooled! It is still vital to understand the "boring" fundamentals of CSS. If you don't know what these libraries are doing under the hood, you’re going to have a hard time debugging them when the "magic" breaks.

The Tutorial vs. Reality

I recently followed a tutorial for creating an infinite scroll gallery. You know the type, where images glide horizontally across the screen forever. I followed the instructions to a T and was thrilled with the result... until I tried to scroll sideways on my trackpad.

Oops! The entire gallery was bleeding off the edge of the page, creating a massive horizontal scrollbar that shouldn't have been there.

Digging into the Code

As I looked through the implementation, I found the culprit in the CSS. The tutorial had the container set to position: absolute with left: 0.

In this implementation, the scroll animation from Framer Motion is being set on the '.skill-scroll' component. The tutorial had the container written as position: absolute with a left: 0, presumably to position the container to the left of the screen and remain stationary through the scroll.

The goal was likely to keep the container stationary while the images moved inside it. However, this created two issues:

Redundancy: Framer Motion’s animation was already handling the x (horizontal) placement using transforms. The left: 0 property wasn't actually doing anything useful.
The Overflow Trap: In CSS, overflow: hidden doesn’t always "catch" elements that are position: absolute. Unless the parent container is also positioned (like position: relative), that absolute child will just fly right past the boundaries.

The Fix

Now, I could have added a wrapper element with position: relative to force the overflow to behave, but why add more code to fix a problem that didn't need to exist? I simply removed the absolute positioning entirely. Voila! A perfect, contained, infinite scroll.

The Takeaway

I was able to solve this in minutes because I understood how CSS positioning interacts with the DOM. If I hadn't known those basics, I might have assumed the bug was a "Framer Motion glitch." I could have spent hours scouring documentation for a library setting when the answer was just one line of CSS.

If you’re learning your way into tech right now, I do encourage you to have fun with the libraries. They are powerful tools! But focus on the fundamentals first. Use libraries to shorten your implementation time, but don't let it replace your understanding.

Please let me know if this was useful to you! Happy coding.