Re: 'border-image' confusion

At 4:52 PM -0800 1/26/11, Brad Kemper wrote:

>On Jan 26, 2011, at 1:32 PM, fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote:
>
>>
>>  It was undefined what happened if you overlapped, so I put in a 
>>definition that
>>  seemed to make sense? Overlapping sides means negative middles, so 
>>I just floored
>>  the middles at zero.
>
>Hmm. Is it too late too late to make a change like that, to allow 
>overlap and still interpret negative middles as zero? It does seem 
>like a fairly easy win, if it was implemented that way. You'd have 
>all your corners and sides...

    Okay, now I'm seeing the problem.  (So I didn't fully understand 
'border-image' after all!)  The problem is that you really are 
slicing the image up into nine adjacent regions, not copying portions 
of the image into eight border slices and a background.  For example, 
the left-side slice has to be the region bounded by the bottom of the 
top left corner slice, the left-offset value, and the top of the 
bottom left corner slice.
    (Aside: even now, how are UAs supposed to treat '50%' when the 
image has an odd-number-of-pixels dimension?  What slices result?)
    The only way I can see to rescue what I was proposing is to say 
that where slice areas overlap, the overlapping region is what's used 
for some slices.  Specifically the top, right, bottom, left, and fill 
slices.  So given this image:

    123
    234
    345

...then 'border-image-slice: 2;' would yield the following slices

    12   2   23
    23   3   34

    23   3   34

    23   3   34
    34   4   45

That's not entirely intuitive either, though.  It would yield the 
result of '100%' (or, in this case, '3') causing every slice to use 
the full image, but the cases in the range 51% - 99%, like this one, 
are a little weird.  And they could lead to some odd joins between 
border regions.
    Unless that sort of result is seen as acceptable or even 
desirable, then I think Tab's right and the only way to make the 
"repeat a single symbol around the edge" use case work is with a new 
keyword.  Either that or it's back to 3x3 grids for everything and a 
number of years repeatedly explaining why something so apparently 
simple needs a kinda goofy-looking base image to drive it.

-- 
Eric A. Meyer (eric@meyerweb.com)     http://meyerweb.com/

Received on Thursday, 27 January 2011 02:45:37 UTC