Re: Shadows vs. layout

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 3, 2009, at 11:55 AM, David Hyatt <hyatt@apple.com> wrote:

> Or put another way, imagine an Aqua button with shadows on it near  
> the bottom of a page.  Or imagine an iChat balloon done using border  
> images (with overflow using that syntax, a similar concept to  
> shadows).  Scrolling to the bottom should not "cut off" the shadow  
> portion of those objects.

I think that if it is important to the design to not have the shadows  
cut off, I would expect the author to leave enough padding to  
accomodate as much of the shadow as needed.

What if the shadows are to be animated? The container they are in  
changes size and shape as the shadows start intersecting with the  
edge? That's nuts!


> Please don't overreact to the horizontal scrollbar problem that  
> exists with all kinds of overflow and assume you somehow have to  
> special case shadow overflow.  This is not an issue that is unique  
> to shadows.

Right. Like border-image, which should also not affect layout.

I was actually surprised and annoyed the first time I found that  
absolutely positioned items caused the page to grow when positioned  
off the right or bottom. That has caused me extra effort to work  
around, actually. But at least I can understand the argument about not  
wanting to render entire sites unusable when they've been designed to  
count on it.

>  It affects all kinds of visual overflow (and for many designs is  
> trivially fixable by just putting overflow-x: hidden on the body).

And for many designs it is not. I do not want to disable the ability  
to scroll when needed, just because the shadow refuses to clip in a  
manner similar to real shadows. If I set a cup of water down near the  
edge of a table, the table does not grow to fit the cup's shadow, no  
matter what portal I am looking at it through.

And in fact, as I mentioned, this has effected my real world design. I  
had an abs pos element that I needed near the edge, and clipping the  
whole page was not a viable option, so I had to choose between an  
unwanted scrollbar (so that visitors can scroll over to the right to  
see nothing important), a smaller shadow, or positioning farther to  
the left. I didn't like those choices much.


>
> dave
> (hyatt@apple.com)
>

Received on Monday, 3 August 2009 20:47:51 UTC