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

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 10:41 AM, Håkon Wium Lie <howcome@opera.com> wrote:

> Also sprach Tab Atkins Jr.:
>
>  > >  - having box shadows on boxes with border-image seems useful. The
>  > >   argument that one can create these shadows in pixmap editor is not
>  > >   convincing. I don't want to open a pixmap editor, I want to set
>  > >   shadows in CSS
>  >
>  > This I simply don't agree with.  The majority of the time, I (and I
>  > mean I, personally) will be using border-image to create
>  > non-rectangular shapes.
>
> That's fine, you are free to do so.


I would go so far as to say that non-rectangular shapes would be the vast
majority of the uses this will be put to.

> box-shadow will be more than useless in these
>  > cases - it will produce a completely unintuitive shadow that doesn't
>  > correspond to any visible edge.
>
> Perhaps. The solution is simple: don't set a box-shadow.


Not so simple, if we are deprived of handling fallback adequately. The
simple solution is to treat box-shadow, border, and border-radius equally in
the way you hide their effects except for fallbacks.


> I'd like to retain the functionality, I find it useful.
>
>  > You say you don't want to open an image editor.  This *is* a valid
>  > concern in *normal* cases, where you are not using an image editor at
>  > all and just want to add a shadow to your box.  If you're using
>  > border-image, though, you're almost certainly creating the image in an
>  > image editor, where adding a semi-transparent shadow is not difficult.
>
> But the end result is an image with a frozen pixmap shadow at a fixed
> resolution and color, forever tied to the border image. I don't want
> that. I want box shadows as vectors that are suitable for printing
>

So now the argument is that it is not OK for the shadow to be a pixelated
raster in situations where the image-based border is a pixelated raster? I
do not agree. And if high resolution is important, you can get that with
image-border, by specifying more pixels of the image than the CSS pixels of
border width.


> and
> DOM manipulations, that compress well. They should be setable
> independently of the border image. E.g., it should be easy to change the
> box shadow color when when hovering over the element.


It is. Use a different image for hover. People do it all the time already
(with background images). For Aqua buttons, for instance, the images will be
very small and easily compressed as PNGs. These very marginal reasons for
doing away with fallback plans just aren't worth the tiny gains you mention.