Pausing CSS Animations with `getAnimations()`

CSS animations offer powerful capabilities for dynamic web interfaces. However, developers often need precise control, including the ability to pause animations programmatically. This can be achieved effectively using the getAnimations() method in JavaScript.

When invoked on an HTML element, getAnimations() returns an array of all Animation objects associated with that element, encompassing both CSS animations and Web Animations API animations. Each Animation object provides access to various properties and methods, such as currentTime (the current position in the animation's timeline) and playState (the current playback state). Crucially, it also offers the pause() method, which allows you to halt the animation's progression.

To pause all active animations on an element, you can iterate through the returned array and call pause() on each Animation object:

const someAnimatedThing = document.querySelector(".thing");
const animations = someAnimatedThing.getAnimations();

animations.forEach((animation) => {
  animation.pause();
});

Alternatively, if you need to pause a specific animation, you can filter the array based on criteria like animation name or playState before applying the pause() method.

A practical demonstration would show how to conditionally pause an animation, for instance, based on its current playState to toggle between playing and paused states.