Re: [css3-background] box-shadow spread radius and rounded corners

On Apr 28, 2010, at 2:28 PM, Sylvain Galineau <sylvaing@microsoft.com>  
wrote:

>> From: Brad Kemper [mailto:brad.kemper@gmail.com]
>
>
>> You're all just getting hung up on that sentence.
> Well, sorry. I don't get to pick which sentence to get 'hung up'
> on and which to interpret as I see fit (or rather: been there,
> done that <cough>).

Yeah. And when it is written, it seems clear at the time and we all  
agree to it, and it isn't always obvious how it might sound or be  
misinterpretted many months later.

> It's there and it's not at all clear that it's
> only meant to be there for sharp corners. Now, if it said:
>
> # When corners are sharp, the shape of the shadow should not
> # change when a spread radius is applied to it.

We can probably do better than that too... But I haven't got anything  
at the moment. It's really not about shadow shape so much as not  
rounding sharp corners (if you just naiively swept an even stroke  
around the border box, the corners would always be rounded).

> Then it would be more likely to be interpreted as an exception to
> the general rule, as opposed to a general requirement for spread
> radius to preserve shape, for instance/in particular for sharp
> corners etc etc.

Yes.

> I also don't think it is at all unreasonable to want shadows to
> scale. Not being a designer, I do not know which of scaling or
> spreading is the most common and desirable use-case so I'll have
> to trust that authors most definitely want spreading for this
> feature much more often than they want scaling.

Scaling might be useful, but I would never give up spread to have it.  
Spread allows me to have a little bit of shadow on the non-shadow  
sides, without changing my desired blur amount. That would be harder  
to do with scaling if, say, I wanted to add a shadow to a long, narrow  
column. If the column is ten or fifteen times taller than wide, then a  
5% scaling is going to be much more profound in the vertical, and much  
less noticable in the horizontal. Even with two scaling factors (h &  
v), you dint always know what what ratio would be.

And I'll mention Adobe products again, as they are made for designers  
and have spread but not scale for shadow effects.

Received on Wednesday, 28 April 2010 22:12:37 UTC