Re: Talk on radial gradients

On Aug 23, 2009, at 11:18 am, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:

> Second, I don't think an ending circle is necessary *at all*, with a
> point or radius.  As I mentioned above, in every case of a radial
> gradient that got passed to me in a design document, it was based
> directly on the box itself.  Thus the box itself should provide the
> ending circle.  There are several ways to do this, and I think they're
> all valid - frex, you could want to end with a circle as wide as the
> box, or as tall as the box, or as large as the smaller or larger
> dimension, or large enough to fully contain the box (the circle
> circumscribes the box).  All of these seem to be valid and reasonable,
> and I would expect that they'd see real use in decent numbers.

I'm not sure I agree here. You could imaging a radial gradient  
background
being used to highlight a foreground item. In that case you'd want to  
gradient
to be a lot smaller than the box. Sure, you could add a color-stop,  
but ever
additional color-stop adds complexity.

> Third, and this is something I'm not completely sure on yet but think
> is probably important, you should be able to specify elliptical
> shapes.

I agree, but FYI elliptical shapes are not supported by Core Graphics  
on Mac,
so there may be significant impediments to implementation.

In general I think the linear-gradient and radial-gradient syntaxes  
should be
as similar as possible, to reduce the (already significant) brain- 
print of
gradients. I'm not sure that differences in usage patterns are more  
important
that making things easy to remember.

Simon

Received on Monday, 24 August 2009 04:44:22 UTC