What are discrete animations?

Question

The MDN animation documentation refers to animation type being discrete. What does this mean?

Answer 1

Discrete animations proceed from one keyframe to the next without any interpolation.

Think of it the way you normally would think of an animation - one image to the next. Interpolation is inbetweening - filling in space between the main images (in the case of computer graphics these are found from formulas).

In traditional hand-drawn animation, the main artist would produce the keyframes, and an assistant would draw the inbetweens.

So discrete animation is like hand-drawn animation done without the inbetweens of an assistant.