I wasted an entire Saturday on this.
Not a lazy Saturday either, but one of those rare, carved-out, “I’m finally going to build that thing” Saturdays. I’d seen Jake Archibald’s demos. I’d watched the Chrome Dev Summit talk. I knew cross-document view transitions were real, that you could get those slick native-feeling page transitions on plain old multi-page sites without a single framework. No React. No Astro. No client-side router pretending your multi-page application (MPA) is single-page application (SPA). Just HTML pages linking to other HTML pages, with the browser handling the animation between them. Hell yes.
So I started building. And nothing worked.
The first tutorial I found had me dropping <meta name="view-transition" content="same-origin"> into my <head>. Seemed simple enough. I added it to both pages, clicked my link, and… nothing. No transition. No error. Just a normal, instant page load like it was 2004. I opened DevTools, double-checked my syntax, restarted the server, tried Chrome Canary, cleared the cache. Nothing. I did what any self-respecting developer does at that point – I copied the code character by character from the blog post and pasted it in. Still nothing.
