Re: [css3-background] Default shadow color

On Mar 3, 2011, at 6:16 PM, Brian Manthos wrote:

> Perhaps I was confused by the title of the mail but...
> 
>>>> Ok, if we have interop on currentColor, we can update the spec that way.
>>>> I'm kindof surprised, because if you do that for text-shadows, it's
>>>> really almost never the right color.
>>>> 
>>>> ~fantasai
>>> 
>>> You've said this twice now, but I'm curious to here why or at least in what
>> way it's "wrong".
>> 
>> It's hard to imagine many wanting their text-shadow to be the color of their
>> text, as that would usually make the text unreadable. If text-shadow had
>> spread it might be useful for creating a pseudo-bold, I suppose, but that
>> would be too hacky for us to encourage in the absence of existing usage.
> 
> I thought we were -- at least initially -- talking about box-shadow.
> 
> If the only reason to consider currentColor as "wrong" is because "text-shadow might look bad", then it should really be a text-shadow tweak (like the no-inset thing) rather than a box-shadow UA-defined shenanigan.
> 
> Or am I missing something?

With text-shadow, currentColor is very likely to produce bad results. With box-shadow, it is merely a useless default. IF your text color is black or gray, then by coincidence that could be a good box-shadow color too. Otherwise, it is unlikely that the color you picked for your text will just happen to be a reasonable design choice for the shadow too. So with box-shadow it is a weird and unexpected choice for a default (that you might not realize if you were using black as the text color), but with text-shadow it is a bad default that authors will need to avoid.

Received on Friday, 4 March 2011 03:10:59 UTC