Re: [Backgrounds/Borders] What to do when a border-image fails to load

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 8:22 PM, Brad Kemper <brad.kemper@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 5:56 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 7:21 PM, David Hyatt <hyatt@apple.com> wrote:
>> > I'm actually inclined to disallow negative offsets for the border-image
>> > box
>> > now that I've thought about it some more, since there is no way an inset
>> > box
>> > can actually respect the original border shape.  By disallowing negative
>> > offsets, we'd help make that clear, i.e., that the intent of expansion
>> > is
>> > for visual frills outside the original border shape, and not to just
>> > draw
>> > some arbitrarily different shape.
>>
>> Eh, I disagree.  A negative offset is effectively identical to just
>> adding extra transparent space around the edge of the image, and
>> increasing the slice depths appropriately.  I don't know if the
>> 'lesson' here is important enough to drive home that we need to
>> disable an ability and force authors to hack around it when required.
>
> The transparent pixels might be used as a sort of hacky way of inserting
> some extra fake non-collapsing margin (kind of like you can with a
> transparent border-color), but I think you could easily get exactly the same
> effect by having some transparent pixels on the outside of your image. I've
> tried to imagine some other reason to have negative offsets, generally
> subscribing to the notion of some future unimagined use being a good thing
> for solving unusual problems, but I can't really see a compelling reason to
> have negative offset. You can still create cool "inside border" effects,
> like inner shadows or 3-d effects, without it.

Well, that's basically what I'm saying.  Negative offsets are
effectively identical to just adding more transparent space around
your image.  Unless handling a negative offset is difficult
programatically, I'm not seeing why it should be disallowed - if it
*is* disallowed, the author can get around it trivially.  Might as
well make it available more easily, then.

~TJ