[css3-background] border-radius color transitions using gradients recommended but undefined

Both the Candidate Recommendations [1] and the latest editor's draft [2] currently state:

"It is not defined what these transitions look like, but a gradient is recommended for color transitions that don't involve dotted or dashed borders."

The gradient transition is recommended but remains undefined. Thus all that could reasonably be tested here is whether the UA does or does not perform the border color 
transition using a gradient instead of a 'sharp' line divider. Whether the implemented gradient behaves interoperably across browsers could not be verified, however (never mind
whether the result fulfills designers' needs and expectations). If this behavior is important to designers - and we believe it is - then the spec ought to specify an interoperable solution. 

Alternatively, we might remove this recommendation from the spec;  the behavior thus far implemented behind vendor prefixes would thus remain the default across all border-radius values until a 
Level 4 version of the module. This outcome would be less interesting but it would be far more likely to result in a matching, testable default rendering across two+ implementations than the current prose.

Given that the spec is in CR and early implementations are already dropping their vendor prefix (e.g. Opera 10.50 pre-Alpha), I was wondering whether other vendors were interested in designing a solution for this recommended behavior during the CR period. 

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-background/
[2] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-background/

Received on Tuesday, 26 January 2010 01:26:25 UTC