Re: Colour gradient backgrounds and CSS textures

 From: Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
>
> On Wednesday, May 12, 2004, 10:06:24 PM, Ernest wrote:
>
>
> EC> Rectangular gradients do not make sense for several
> EC> properties that do use <color>.  I may spend some time
> EC> this weekend to come up with a fairly detailed gradient
> EC> proposal.
>
> Once you are done reinventing SVG, we can then see how
> detailed it was.

Reinventing SVG is not my intention.

I don't intend on proposing supporting arbitrary shapes or anything
beyond a simple linear gradient.  No scripting or animation.  Stops
only at what SVG would consider the beginning and the end. SVG is
a tool to use for complex stuff, but I'm talking about simple stuff that
won't require a full implementation of SVG to handle.

Mega "let's implement every W3C standard" applications might be
nice in the abstract, but a pain in the rear to program, and usually
more than is what is needed.  If that's the only thing worth implementing,
then why doesn't the W3C just go ahead and combine everything into
XLML (Xtra-Large Markup Language)?  There are a ton of applications
for which SVG is just simply much more than what is needed.  Basic
gradient patterns are simple to implement, simple to specify and are
clearly an aspect of styling that is being used on the web today
usually with non-scaled background images which is hardly
great.  scaled background images would be a minor improvement
but will generally require a separate fetch  (Files representing smooth
gradients would for most uses be too large to work with data:URL's.)

When I said detailed, I meant that rather than a plain vanilla
description it would be something that could actually be examined
with full implementation guidelines, not that it would be anywhere as
complicated as even SVG Print Tiny.

Gradients are certainly far less complicated than the 'border-mage-*'
properties in the CSS3 Borders WD to both implement and understand.
Now getting CSS to drop those in favor of using SVG and ::outside
  e::outside{background-image:url("example.svg")}
would be a good idea.  The ::outside pseudo-element from the
generated content module is well suited for building up complicated
borders and in this case would be able to do it with one image rather
than the eight that CSS currently contemplates.

There is one thing I think we can agree on tho.  Adding gradients
to CSS by extending the <color> value type would be a bad idea.

Received on Wednesday, 12 May 2004 18:39:57 UTC