RE: Repeating gradients (Was: Re: Talk on radial gradients)

Brad Kemper wrote:
| I feel that the emphasis for CSS gradient "images" should be on the
| commonest cases, written simply, with little (if any) special magic
| for how they repeat in backgrounds. It seems to me that endlessly
| repeating radial gradients would be pretty uncommon, and should be
| left to SVG for that. If gradient is an image type in CSS, it should
| just behave like an image.

In the case of a radial gradient, the simplest case would be circular, with
nothing but color stops, the last of which defines the encompassing square.
Dimensions would be decimal numbers from 0 to 1. The gradient would be
considered to have no intrinsic width or height, so it would be sized by
default to fill the background positioning area (an elliptical gradient when
width != height). Repeating a small-sized gradient could be used for a
polka-dot background or a soft-dotted line.

Should there be a means to name (and cache) a gradient 'generated image' for
reuse? If I have a class that uses the same gradient throughout a website,
might it not be counter-productive, relative to a cached image file, to have
the gradient reconstructed at each occurance?

David Perrell

Received on Wednesday, 26 August 2009 16:00:36 UTC