Re: drop-shadow filter vs. a separate property

I have nothing against adding a new CSS property. WebKit already has an experimental drop shadow property for SVG (-webkit-svg-shadow). But it is a different approach to add a new property to make it easier for web developers to access a feature or to add it because of performance concerns. The performance concern won't disappear with a new property.

Dirk


Am 18.01.2012 um 15:23 schrieb Chris Marrin:

> 
> On Jan 18, 2012, at 2:03 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 1:53 PM, Chris Marrin <cmarrin@apple.com> wrote:
>>> I've been implementing hardware accelerated filters in WebKit and the drop-shadow filter is a real stumbling block. All of the hardware accelerated ways we have to implement it are problematic. It's a pretty complex filter, requiring two separate input paths, color channel swizzling, blur and blending of the inputs. All that is possible, but integrating it into a chain of other filters is difficult and has performance issues. For hardware, doing drop-shadow as a single operation after the filter chain is way easier. This is a small problem on desktop hardware, but a much bigger one on mobile hardware where resources are much more scarce.
>>> 
>>> So I got to thinking about why we have a drop-shadow filter at all. Drop shadow is a great feature for CSS and has been discussed a lot. But it seems like it could just as easily be done as a separate property that is applied after filtering. Then it would be like box-filter, but would use the alpha of the element rather than its bounds.
>>> 
>>> Most of the current CSS filters don't even affect the alpha channel, so there would be no way to tell where in the chain the drop-shadow appeared. So in most cases having a separate drop-shadow property would be functionally equivalent. I think the only time it would matter is with blur and another drop-shadow filter. In those two cases you'd get different results depending on whether or not you put the drop-shadow before of after the filter. I'm sure someone could come up with a use case where you could see the difference between a drop-shadow filter vs a property. But are such use cases essential?
>>> 
>>> I want to make sure these filters can be efficiently hardware accelerated. For Apple hardware at least (and I'm assuming other platforms have the same issues), doing drop shadow as a separate function after filters is easily hardware accelerated. But a drop shadow filter is very resource intensive.
>>> 
>>> Dean told me that this issue was discussed at a recent meeting that I didn't attend, but I haven't found any notes from that meeting. Can someone recap the rationale for wanting a drop-shadow filter rather than a property?
>> 
>> The immediate reason to want a drop-shadow filter is that drop shadows
>> are very common, and it currently takes six filters to implement.
>> Making a shortcut filter for it is just good sense.
>> 
>> I'm not sure if forcing it to always be after the rest of the filters
>> would be acceptable or not - we'd have to look at existing usage of
>> drop shadows.
> 
> But why are we thinking of this as a filter? Isn't it more like text-shadow or box-shadow than a filter? I mean, you can (and often do) implement them using a filter chain. But I don't see the motivation for having drop-shadow as a filter function rather  than a standalone property. In fact, now that I think of it, isn't having drop-shadow be a filter when text-shadow and box-shadow are not inconsistent?
> 
> I absolutely think we need a drop-shadow property. As Dean says, it gives you a way of adding a non-rectangular shadow to elements with alpha, which box-shadow does not. I just think we should consider making it a property rather than a filter function.
> 
> -----
> ~Chris
> cmarrin@apple.com
> 
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> 
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Received on Wednesday, 18 January 2012 23:37:49 UTC