Using CSS Transitions on Auto Dimensions
According to the Mozilla Developer Network docs, auto values have been intentionally excluded from the CSS transitions spec. It looks like it’s been requested by a few people, but when you think about it, it makes at least a little sense that it hasn’t been included. The browser process that re-calculates the sizes and positions of all elements based on their content and the way they interact with each other (known as “reflow”) is expensive. If you were to transition an element into a
heightofauto, the browser would have to perform a reflow for every stage of that animation, to determine how all the other elements should move. This couldn’t be cached or calculated in a simple way, since it doesn’t know the starting and/or ending values until the moment the transition happens. This would significantly complicate the math that has to be done under the hood and probably degrade performance in a way that might not be obvious to the developer.