After trying unsuccesssfully for about a week to split a block of text into spans of words or letters, I finally followed the KISS rule and made something work. Originally, I was trying to recurse through every non-textNode and split the textNodes inside their parentNodes so any HTML inside the supplied node would remain intact. However, some HTML "features" (and lack of sleep) prevented all my attempts from providing me with what I thought would be a simple, robust, and efficient bit of magic. However, now that I have something working it will be easier to refine the code into my original vision.

I probably should read this story daily. It's easy to revert to my old method of productivity.

You can check out the "alpha" version of the text-explode animations here. Depending on your computer, the second one might perform extremely poorly.