Re: [css3-background] CSS Drop Shadows

Text-shadow is shadowing some actual drawing.  Box-shadow, though, is  
just a decorative effect around the edges of a box.  I don't think  
they are that similar (other than syntactically).

Possible new properties that would shadow actual drawing and that  
would behave more like text-shadow include:
	shadow - Shadow all drawing done by the object and its descendants.
	border-shadow - Shadow actual border drawing (would get messy at  
border corners just as RGBA overlap does)
	background-shadow - Shadow actual background drawing (this would do  
more what you want with a partially transparent background for  
example, since the shadow would show through the transparency)

dave
(hyatt@apple.com)

On Dec 19, 2007, at 12:07 PM, David Hyatt wrote:

> On Dec 19, 2007, at 9:54 AM, Brad Kemper wrote:
>
>> Well, I guess that is the big question. Personally, I think most of  
>> the time I wouldn't mind having the show continue fully under the  
>> box, but it might be useful at times to turn that off, perhaps with  
>> an extra parameter to box-shadow to say if that it is knockout  
>> (defaulting to "not").
>>
>
> We can't implement the other way.   Shadows in CoreGraphics are  
> drawn as a side effect of another drawing operation.  You "turn on"  
> shadows in the graphics context, do some drawing, and a shadow is  
> cast by whatever you draw automatically.  This means that in order  
> to implement box-shadow, we actually have to do a fill rect  
> operation.  The only way to show only the shadow and not the fill is  
> to set a clip that prevents the area occupied by the fill from being  
> drawn into.
>
> For a fully transparent box, there is no shadow to be cast, since  
> there is no fill, and the shadow is inside the area occupied by any  
> fill that we would do in order to get the shadow to draw in the  
> first place.
>
>> It is interesting to note that when combining text-shadow with  
>> opacity that the shadow does not show through the letters. It does  
>> seem as though there should be some consistency between the text- 
>> shadow and box-shadow.
>>
>
> It's not supposed to.  opacity blends everything inside the layer  
> after the fact as a single unit. so I think this is not a very good  
> example to bring up.
>
> If you did RGBA text with text-shadow, then you would see the shadow  
> behind the letters.
>
> dave
> (hyatt@apple.com)
>