Re: Colour gradient backgrounds.

Ernest Cline wrote:
>>[Original Message]
>>From: Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@iinet.net.au>
>>
>>I'm all for adding new types of colour properties and values to CSS, 
>>but not at the expense of crossing *too far* into the realm of images. 
>>For example, I have been thinking about for a while, but not yet 
>>proposed, adding properties to do bitwise (NOT, OR, XOR and AND) 
>>operations between colours and backgrounds which wouldn't use up
>>much processing power at all, but haven't had time to write up a full 
>>proposal. Maybe later this week I'll get around to it.
>  
> Well, I think that probably would go too far, largely because those who
> would use such effects likely will be graphic professionals who would
> likely be doing stuff better suited for SVG, Flash, or PDF, than using
> the box model and CSS. This is not because it would be complicated
> to program, but because it would be complicated for people to figure
> out what they wanted from it.

> Gradients don't have that problem. They are easy for both humans
> and computers to grasp.

   No, I disagree.  For gradients to be really useful to a designer, in
all but the most basic cases, you would need to introduce additional
properties to control the start, mid and end position's of the gradient. 
  The *rate of change* may vary according to some kind of curve eg. sin 
wave, or even a bezier curve.  It may have more than two colours, or any 
other feature you can think of.  In all of these cases, a designer would 
need to resort to using images.

   As for the bitwise operations I was thinking about, above, I may be 
able to think up some use cases where such a feature would be useful, 
but then the more I think about it, just like gradients, the same, or 
more advanced visual effects could be done as just as easily with a
background-image, and a foreground-image.

-- 
Lachlan Hunt

Received on Monday, 17 May 2004 06:32:08 UTC