Re: Border-Images and 'round': CSS Backgrounds and Borders Module Level 3

On Oct 3, 2009, at 1:14 AM, fantasai wrote:

> fantasai wrote:
>> Brad Kemper wrote:
>>>
>>> On Oct 2, 2009, at 10:44 PM, fantasai wrote:
>>>
>>>> If I was better with graphics I'd draw a picture to illustrate  
>>>> this. :)
>>>
>>> Did you see my link, where I was trying to illustrate a similar  
>>> point?
>>>
>>> http://www.bradclicks.com/cssplay/border-image/round-test1.html
>
> BTW, can you add a sample that's closer to halfway in between whole  
> numbers?
> Those are very close to a whole number.

Yes, I created those examples to be very close to, but not exactly, a  
whole number of repetitions, in order to show the extreme cases.

I've updated the page to show true rounding now, with examples there  
that fall near the midway point between upscaling and downscaling, so  
you can see the limits of its extremes of jumping one way or the other:

http://www.bradclicks.com/cssplay/border-image/round-test1.html

By the way, as an author, if I saw too much upscaling and didn't want  
to recreate the image to fit the box better, I would probably adjust  
the 'border-image-width' downwards in order to allow room for another  
tile to pop in (or possibly upwards a bit to simultaneously lessen the  
distortion and reduce the the tile width). This is where it would be  
really handy to have a scaling factor based on a percentage of the  
original pixel size. That way, I could have e.g. '99%' instead of  
'auto'.

'border-image-width' the way it is now would be handy for simulating  
border-radius effects, if 'border-radius' could have percentages as  
values. But it currently does not allow this. So I feel that either  
both properties should allow percentages (as they both define corner  
decoration sizes), or else (my preference) percentage on 'border-image- 
width' should be a percentage of the intrinsic image slice size  
(assuming 1 image pixel == 1 CSS pixel, unless a CSS resolution  
property says otherwise).

So to answer this question:
Are percentages of the border-image area useful?
They would be more useful if there was a corresponding percentage for  
'border-radius', as it would be nice for the same sort of cases:  
creating oval and circular borders using (mostly) 50% as the  
percentage. But as with 'border-radius', there is no easy way to have  
a single size for both dimensions of the corner, e.g. if you wanted a  
round-corner button that had corner radii that were 20% of the height,  
or a text box with corner pictures that were 10% of the width.