Re: [css-masking][css4-background][css-images] 9-part sliced images (was: [css4-background] 9-part slicing images in background-image)

On Fri, 2014-01-03 at 07:40 +0000, Dirk Schulze wrote:
> On Jan 3, 2014, at 8:06 AM, Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:

> > If border-image were to be extended I'd for sure want to see more
> > traditional 16-part border images (plus middle) - they are like the
> > 9-part we have now but with centre images in each segment, and allowing
> > the extensible parts between corner and middle to differ on each side of
> > centre:
> 
> Liam, searching for "16 slice scaling” gives no results for 16 slice
> scaling but exclusively for “9 slice scaling”.

By traditional I meant, as in print page layout; on the Web the way to
achieve a traditional-style border that can be resized or "liquid" is to
nest multiple HTML elements, one to draw a 9-tile border, one (or more)
for the centre image at the top (and sides and bottom), and possibly one
could use another element sized to 50% and with a transform to get a
different fill image on the two sides (and then again for top/bottom
half).

>  I fear that 16 tiles is too complex to handle for authors anyway.
I think 9 would be too complex if you had to give 9 sets or coordinates.

>  I am not even sure which graphics tool does support 16 tiles today.
On the Web? none that I know of.

In print you don't need dynamic scaling of the images so often, so you
can use a fixed border image; people also build them up out of repeated
characters from specially-designed ornament fonts (e.g. Celestia
Ornaments). The 9-tile method also wasn't used (as far as I know) for
print before CSS and the Web. I think most (print) page designers today
would get out Illustrator and draw a border as a single vector graphic,
with multiple versions if they needed to handle short pages.

I'm very open to other approaches, by the way, as long as they can
reasonably be made to work in print - which today means not relying on
JavaScript shims. For example, an SVG border approach involving (e.g.)
SMIL animation with the "time" axis being used for content size, or some
new kind of growable SVG path.

I can give you examples of borders from print production, but you can
look at ads, books, magazines yourself to see that :-)

Sorry, a long answer. Maybe I should take borders to the publishing IG
and see what demand those folks have.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

Received on Friday, 3 January 2014 20:04:27 UTC