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Monorail – Turn CSS animations into interactive SVG graphs

Monorail – Turn CSS animations into interactive SVG graphs

5 comments

·July 8, 2025
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stanko

Hey HN,

I needed a few simple graphs for a blog post [0]. Instead of slapping together a few SVGs and moving on, I decided to write a whole library to parse CSS keyframe animations and convert them to interactive graphs.

It ended up being a rabbit hole, with a lot of caveats. But it was fun to make, and I'm really happy with the graphs it produces.

I'm not sure how useful it will be for others. If you end up using it, I'd love to see how - feel free to reach out.

It's open source [1] under the MIT license. Written in TypeScript with no dependencies.

Let me know what you think!

[0] https://muffinman.io/blog/css-image-glitch/

[1] https://github.com/Stanko/monorail

efskap

Cool stuff! Flattening things like colours into a 1D value is an interesting challenge here. How did you decide to weigh the R channel an order of magnitude higher than G and so on? I might've tried working with HSV for instance, since it feels like animations would often be along one of those axes, but maybe not.

didgeoridoo

Is that what’s happening with the color? I assumed it was doing (R+G+B)•Opacity, so the max would be 255•3=765 and the min would be 0.

deivid

Interesting! I had the opposite idea: to convert arbitrary SVG to CSS..

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