Re: [css3-background] Where we are with Blur value discussion

On Jul 24, 2010, at 2:47 PM, Dennis Amrouche wrote:
> BTW: we already "layout" inside the browser.
> example: text-shadow.
> 
> You can have low-level shadow effects on typo today, but you can only set parameters for x,y-directions and one for the strenght of the blur-effect.
> But there are no options to manipulate either transparency or filling-rate of the shadow…

There are rgba() colors that allow you to set the opacity of the shadow, and this works well as a means to do so without complicating the shadow syntax.

> or a second color for a gradient.

Part of the goal of CSS is to be simple, to author and to understand and learn. A gradient in the blur would be an infrequent need compared to the simpler shadows commonly used, even when they are created even as images. I believe that SVG has (or will have) a way to combine filter effects to get that sort of thing when needed though (but I am not an SVG expert).

> I really think that "text-shadow" is a weak implementation regarding your decisions in the w3c to let the browser process more visual rendering itself than letting the authors plaster html elements with background images or exchange text contents by foreground images all over a web site.

Do you mean that generating effects (such as box shadow or text shadow) in-browser is better than using images for the same thing? I agree, as long as doing so is kept simple for CSS, and as long as CSS covers the most common needs. I don't think we want box-shadow to be any more complex than it already is in order to be more powerful for less needed effects. 

Text-Shadow is underspecified, but hopefully the attention to detail that we've put into box-shadow will be transferred into an updated CSS3 text-shadow spec with the same features and details (more or less), soon after box-shadow has been finalized.

Received on Saturday, 24 July 2010 23:02:13 UTC