I’m running into a small problem attempting to have an animation stopped mid-animation gracefully

Question

0

Asked: May 26, 20262026-05-26T01:02:09+00:00 2026-05-26T01:02:09+00:00

I’m running into a small problem attempting to have an animation stopped mid-animation gracefully

0

I’m running into a small problem attempting to have an animation stopped mid-animation gracefully returning to the default state. I’m applying an animation to a child element using the :hover pseudoclass on a parent element, but would like the animation to gracefully return to the default state when I stop hovering on the element. I’m getting the feeling that I shouldn’t be using the :hover pseudoclass here and there’s another method of approaching it, but I can’t seem to figure out how to get it to transition off. It just instantly reverts to the base state, which of course makes sense because the animation is being stripped – but that’s not the desired effect. This is the current HTML:

<div id="el1">
    <div class="child"></div>
</div>

and the current CSS

#el1 {
    margin-top: 100px;
    position: relative;
    background: transparent url(./image.png) no-repeat;
    height: 100px;
    width: 100px;
}

#el1 .child {
    height: 100%;
    width: 100%;
    background-color: white;
    opacity: 0;
}

#el1:hover .child {
    -webkit-animation-name: semiopacity;
    -webkit-animation-iteration-count: infinite;
    -webkit-animation-duration: 0.5s;
    -webkit-animation-direction: alternate;
    -webkit-animation-timing-function: linear;
    -webkit-animation-fill-mode: forwards;
}

@-webkit-keyframes semiopacity {
    from { opacity: 0; }
    to { opacity: 0.4; }
}

To recap: There’s a flashing white effect over the image when hovering. I want it to animate back to the original keyframe when I stop hovering instead of snapping back to “off”. I can change either the HTML or CSS; no restrictions on how to make it work.