[CSS3-text] Proposal: text-shadow enhancements

Hello,

Seeing that text-shadow will ship in the next version of FF, and Opera 
(and, to a lesser extent, Safari) already support it, I would like to 
propose to extend its syntax in the following two ways:

First, add a spread radius for the shadow. It would also functionally 
replace the proposed "text-outline" property. The advantages are multiple:
- in some situations, a shadow is barely visible when you use large 
"blur" values. In those cases, the current workaround can be to specify 
multiple times the same shadow. It is far from elegant, and using a 
spread radius instead would assure the author that the large blur radius 
isn't enough to make the shadow invisible.
- the "box-shadow" property also has a spread radius, so it would be 
more consistent to have it for text-shadow, too
- it allows multiple outlines (including semi-transparent ones)
- it allows shadows and outlines to be stacked in any arbitrary order by 
the author. The number of effects that can be achieved is thus much higher.

Second, I would like to backup this proposal: 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2007Nov/0088.html 
("text-shadow to accept foreground color")
This allows graceful degradation for browsers that do not support 
text-shadow, in the cases where an author would use the same "color" and 
"background-color", and rely on a shadow of a different color to make 
the text readable.
As it is a fairy common use case (for example, about every text-shadow 
demo on the net uses it), I think such an intuitive way to have graceful 
degradation would be much appreciated.
If not, authors will have to either rely on complex scripts to check 
whether text-shadow is supported, or will resort to image-replacement 
techniques once again.

Regards,
Jordan Osete

Received on Sunday, 26 October 2008 15:27:05 UTC