Re: [css3-background] Default shadow color

My oft used use case for text shadow is:

text-shadow: 0 0 1px currentColor;

reason: graphic designers like to use helvetica thin, which is illegible. a tiny shadow makes the text legible.

So, while developers can decide "I want all my drop shadows to be rgba(0,0,0,0.3) (I find 0.5 way too dark), it would be much more complex to always define the current color of the text, which could be forever changing. Grey is easy to determine. What color your text is throughout a site is much more difficult to determine.


I would prefer to see text shadow remain current color.

-Estelle
http://www.standardista.com

On Mar 3, 2011, at 5:42 PM, Brad Kemper wrote:

> On Mar 3, 2011, at 4:29 PM, Brian Manthos <brianman@microsoft.com> wrote:
> 
>>> Ok, if we have interop on currentColor, we can update the spec that way.
>>> I'm kindof surprised, because if you do that for text-shadows, it's really
>>> almost never the right color.
>>> 
>>> ~fantasai
>> 
>> You've said this twice now, but I'm curious to here why or at least in what way it's "wrong".
> 
> It's hard to imagine many wanting their text-shadow to be the color of their text, as that would usually make the text unreadable. If text-shadow had spread it might be useful for creating a pseudo-bold, I suppose, but that would be too hacky for us to encourage in the absence of existing usage. 
> 
>> Also, it's ... odd ... that the default value seems difficult to get "right" but apparently that hasn't been enough to warrant getting it specced explicitly (until now).
>> 
>> Put another way ... if it's important to get right, why would you leave it as wide open as UA-defined?
> 
> Maybe the WG at the time assumed the UA would get it right, or use an OS-dependent default. If we define it, I'd rather see something more reasonable, such as rgba(0,0,0,0.5), based on the theory that real shadows darken what's behind them, but not completely so, usually (on earth, or other planets or spaces with atmosphere).

Received on Friday, 4 March 2011 03:27:12 UTC