How I'm using CSS View Transitions on this blog

In the old days of the web, animating between pages meant faking it with jQuery. Then came pjax, which used pushState to swap in fetched content and fake a full navigation without one, still relying on popState to stop the back button breaking. Every single-page app since has done some version of the same trick, intercept the link click, fetch the new content, swap it in, animate the swap yourself. It works, but it means every navigation runs through a JS router, even on a static blog that didn’t need one otherwise. Cross-document view transitions do the same job without any of that, and there’s no JavaScript API involved at all. It’s a single @view-transition rule in the CSS. No router, no fetch, no client-side history hijacking, the browser still does a real navigation to a real URL, it just captures the outgoing page as it leaves and lets CSS animate that against the incoming one. There’s also a JavaScript View Transition API (document.startViewTransition()), for same-document…