Question

I seem to experiencing a problem with the JQuery animation. I can animate the background image in the positive direction, but not in the negative direction. Any suggestions as to how to remedy this?

$(this).parent().css('background-position-y', '19px');
$(this).parent().animate({ 'background-position-y': '-=19px' }, 1000, 'linear');

Answer 1

Positioning the background via separate background-position-x/y is a feature that Internet Explorer introduced but never made it into a W3C specification. Any recommendations to add it to the spec have since been denied.

See:
http://snook.ca/archives/html_and_css/background-position-x-y

You can always create your own little plugin, it’s not that hard.

Using jQuery 1.8 we now have access to the $.Animation method that gives us the animated values directly without to much work, so we can do something like :

$.fn.animateBG = function(x, y, speed) {
    var pos = this.css('background-position').split(' ');
    this.x = pos[0] || 0,
    this.y = pos[1] || 0;
    $.Animation( this, {
        x: x,
        y: y
      }, { 
        duration: speed
      }).progress(function(e) {
          this.css('background-position', e.tweens[0].now+'px '+e.tweens[1].now+'px');
    });
    return this;
}

And then to use it we can do:

$("#background").animateBG(x-value, y-value, speed);​

FIDDLE

This is something I whipped up for another answer some days ago, and only works with pixels and does have some limitations, but it’s simple and should work for most cases.

I guess something like this would do what you want:

$(this).parent()
       .css('background-position', '0 19px');
       .animateBG(0, 0, 1000);​