svg is a pretty great alternative. All the techniques and basic theory here hold true; you create a path with a given length, and then set strokeDasharray and strokeDashoffset to the same length. Then you can just do path. animate({strokeDashoffset: 0}, 1000); for the same effect (1000 is time in ms).

Animating objects along SVG Paths
With SVG and CSS, another cool thing you can do is animate objects or elements following a path. There are 2 SVG attributes we are going to use for the animation: offset-path: The offset-path CSS property specifies the offset path where the element gets positioned.