RE: [css3-background] Default shadow color

[Brad Kemper:]
> I'd rather leave it undefined in the hope that perhaps some specialized UA
> could do the right thing (while the big guns Web browsers maintain status
> quo if it is so much to ask to change), than to mandate a useless default
> that can render text unreadable. And I'd expect consistency of the default
> between box- and text-shadow.

Keeping something undefined to make it more useful sounds like a dubious 
trade-off for standard spec. 

There may be good reasons to keep this undefined; not documenting a behavior 
that all implementations actually agree on in the *hope* that this gives some
unspecified imaginary someone an extra incentive to break interop to do something 
no current author or existing stylesheet will benefit from doesn't sound like an 
actionable priority to me.

Any authoring environment that assists with writing CSS - from Adobe's product to 
Daniel's BlueGriffon - is perfectly able to provide interesting smart shadow defaults 
based on all the available information to them combined with any heuristics they 
choose. Nothing prevents them from doing that that and I don't see how purposefully 
avoiding implementation reality adds any value to that process.

In the meantime, I'd like to test that the color component of shadows is optional. 
That's a bit harder if transparent is a conformant default value. When everyone 
already uses a perfectly testable behavior it also seems silly.

Received on Friday, 4 March 2011 17:09:13 UTC