Re: Text masking...

David Woolley wrote:

> What you are proposing is actually a standard PostScript operator.
However,
> it is, however, treated as a foreground operation, not one with
backgrounds;
> one makes a selection mask with the text then paints that.

I'm not too sure what you're getting at, right here.  How does this tie into
CSS?

> I don't see that such an operator poses any great CSS language problems,
> although it might bloat the renderer.  The real question is how many
> features should you really have in what is supposed to be a simple
language.

That's a good question, actually.  I'm not too sure on that.  Again, this is
why what I suggested is merely a suggestion.  I don't stick behind it too
furvidly, although it would be fun to toy with.

> You fail to mention the primary reason why this is undesirable; it
> is abusing an image mechanism to render text (and often is accompanied
> by a failure to provide alt attributes to mitigate the use of images).
> It should not be considered a valid way of writing CSS/HTML web pages.

I didn't say it was a valid way of writing them; I actually suggest against
it.  You're also right that I failed to mention that using graphics
applications for rendering something as simple as text is one of the main
reasons to not use that technique.  But you have to also realize that there
are very, very, very many other reasons for not doing it that way.  I
couldn't have mentioned them all. ;-)

> PS please save bandwidth by posting plain text only.

Finally, sorry about the rich-text email.  I wasn't paying attention.  echo
"I'm tired.\n";

Received on Monday, 1 November 2004 09:53:13 UTC