Re: [css3-images] Resolving on gradient issues

On Aug 4, 2011, at 8:28 PM, Brian Manthos <brianman@microsoft.com> wrote:

> Further, Brad wrote:
>> And there already is very little need/demand for 'repeating-radial-gradient'.
> 
> I believe quite the opposite.  The current repeating-radial-gradient provides capabilities that can't be simulated with background-repeat or any other properties without significant shenanigans.

My point was that we already have a familiar way of repeating things in backgrounds, and even with 'repeating-linear-gradient' available in prefixed versions, authors seem to greatly prefer using background-repeat and background-size instead, as I predicted. That is my impression from looking at the code of many of the samples that Lea Verou has showcased [1]. 

You don't need shenanigans to get there. If we had 'background-rotate' to rotate the background canvas, you would even need a magic 'auto' value to deal with gradients. You could just set them to 'from bottom' (or whatever that will be called), and then set 'background-rotate' to some number of deg.

> Lastly, let's imagine you did "something interesting" with background-repeat, and tossed out repeating-linear-gradient and repeating-radial-gradient.  Well, you've just removed the capability of repeating gradients from list-style-image and generated content.  For no good reason.

The reason is that there would be almost no need ever for them there, in my opinion. It is a very weak use case. Mostly, gradients are needed for backgrounds. If they are also available for the tiny number of authors who actually want a repeating pattern in their list-style-images, well that's really just gravy. 

> I think the current repeating-linear-gradient and repeating-radial-gradient provide capabilities not found in other places, and aren't easily replaced with other syntax.
> 
> I recommend we stop fiddling here -- leave these well-defined and well-understood repeating gradients as is.

At this point, I am OK with that, even though I think they are mostly redundant, and that 'repeating-linear-gradient' will usually only be used when background-repeat can't do the job (which would be even more rare if we could rotate background layers by degrees).

1) http://leaverou.me/css3patterns/

Received on Friday, 5 August 2011 05:25:53 UTC