Border styling

See http://pages.prodigy.net/chris_beall/Amaya/Borderstyle.html

When adjacent border segments are different colors, Firefox, Opera, and even
IE 6 create a 45° angle boundary between them.  This is often used to create
a 'raised' or 'embossed' beveled-edge appearance.

Amaya has a very creative, but quite different approach.  Each border
segment has a hot-dog shape and they are rendered in counter-clockwise order
starting at the top.  This creates a shape the appearance of which is
difficult to describe, but is not what anyone is going to want.  (It DOES
produce rounded corners, which has become sort of a holy grail, but CSS 3
will provide a way for authors to request such styling and they will be
surprised to get it unexpectedly.)

Finally, although the rendering order is CCW, the 'Show applied style'
function insists on listing the properties in CW order (also starting with
the top border).  Order is, of course, not significant per CSS 2.1, but one
might expect the two parts of Amaya to be in agreement.  (In the sample page
NEITHER order matches the actual order specified in the source HTML, which
was entered by hand).

I believe the Amaya rendering should match that of other browsers, i.e. use
the 45° intersection, which makes order of rendering irrelevant.

Chris Beall

<soapbox>
P.S. Why do I think rendering details are important?  Amaya claims (on the
opening page) to aspire to being a "a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)
environment."  But 'get' where?  Only in Amaya?  Although web page authors
expect some variation from one browser to the next, too much creativity will
cause them to conclude that what they see with Amaya is too far removed from
what people with other browsers will 'get'.

Amaya is trying to push standards.  Most web designers don't care about
standards (look at what's out there now).  They will, however, gravitate
toward tools that make their job easier, faster, hence cheaper, while
producing the results THEY want, which, for better or worse, are usually
expressed in terms of visual rendering.
</soapbox>

Received on Thursday, 23 February 2006 00:39:07 UTC