Tutorial: Realistic Waterfall with CSS3

A recent project requires me to create a realistic running waterfall. For such task, what came first to my mind was to use animated GIF or PNG sprite sheet and loop them frame by frame. Then my friend, Justin, explored more with a semi-transparent water layer overlaying a static waterfall image using Photoshop & Flash. The result was really satisfying. So I decide to adopt it into our project which is pure HTML. Thanks to CSS' background repeat and the new CSS3's animation, the task was really simple to achieve and straight forward.

Here's the demo & source code on Dabblet: http://dabblet.com/gist/2403656

It is worth noting that CSS3's animation is still an experiment feature. You can still achieve same result using JS to shift the background at intervals.

Let me explain step by step to re-create the effect:

Geany: open-source SublimeText for front-end developer

When I started doing JavaScript, I kept searching for an ideal JS code editor that is free, lightweight and fast just like FlashDevelop, my favorite ActionScript counter part. (In case you're wondering, I have made a Wine mod of FD4 and been able to run it on Linux). Most JS editors I tried were Java-based, heavy and code assistance is as not good as I expected.

Then I discovered SublimeText 2 and Geany. The former is commercial and the latter is opensource. Both of them are cross platform, lightweight, fast and has syntax highlighting for quite a number languages. For JavaScript and front-end stuff in particular, they both have some support for code hinting and auto completion but fairly limited.

Geany interface