Re: [CSSWG] Minutes and Resolutions 2009-02-04: box-shadow and border-image

On Feb 4, 2009, at 4:47 PM, fantasai wrote:

>  RESOLVED: box-shadow is not suppressed by border-image
>  RATIONALE: It's useful in many cases, and the author can suppress
>             it himself as needed.

Can this be reopened? I strongly disagree with the reasoning above,  
and the minutes do not mention the arguments I gave in other e- 
mails[1], and ask for a test case but don't mention the one I  
provided[2]. My main points:

1. Having box-shadow and border-image visible at the same time is NOT  
useful. Those who are creating the images for border-image can very  
easily create them with shadows already included in the images[3].  
Created that way, they can follow the complex contours of the raster  
border in whatever fashion the artist chooses. There is no reason to  
have the UA do it instead at that point. In most all cases, except  
only where the images all have straight edges and square or round  
corners that all exactly align with the border-box, the UA generated  
shadow will not be in the right place.

2. The PRIMARY reason an author would specify both is for fallback  
reasons. Some UAs may support box-shadow without supporting border- 
image, or the user may have turned off images in their browser (in  
which case border-image should really be ignored too) or may have set  
a user style sheet to 'border-image: none !important' (because they  
really hate loading images that are only used in borders). In those  
cases, box-shadow provides a good fallback. BUT... only if the UA does  
not render both at the same time.

So, having both box-shadow and border-image _visible_ at the same time  
is NOT useful in many cases, and the author CANNOT suppress it himself  
in the case in which having these two properties in the same rule  
would be most useful.






[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2009Jan/0131.html
and http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2009Jan/0245.html

[2] http://www.bradclicks.com/cssplay/TV-Border.html (last row)

[3] like this image I created for the test case above (with  
transparency):
http://www.bradclicks.com/cssplay/border-image/tv-shadow.png

Received on Thursday, 5 February 2009 16:31:52 UTC