On my way back home from #SotB2026 I hacked my way into animating between `position-area` values with View Transitions. The VT automatically gets started by a StyleObserver.
Demo + details can be found on my blog: https://brm.us/animate-position-area
It’s not 100% perfect though, as Firefox doesn’t do anything and Chrome has a 1-frame glitch.

Experiment: Animating CSS position-area with View Transitions
CSS Anchor Positioning is a powerful tool, but one of the things that you cannot do natively (yet) is animating the position-area property. This blog post introduces a technique to animate position-area changes using View Transitions.
www.bram.us · Bram.us
Link author:
Bramus@bramus@front-end.social