Targetting Filter Effects

I'm looking at the things coming into www-style, and there's
a class of them that are all about filter effects: shadows,
opacity, and the like. roc had proposed using the SVG 'filter'
property to expand the range of filters beyond shadows and
opacity. I think that's a great idea. But the problem we have
here is targetting different aspects of the box. We've got
requests for targetting:

   - the entire element, composited
   - the border layer only
   - the background layer only
   - individual background layers
   - the backdrop only (border + backgrounds)
   - the composited content of the element minus the backdrop

I might even be missing some combinations here. Problem is,
that we're going to look at a property explosion if we try
to address these separately. Nevermind the overhead, it's
going to be a hard-to-control cascading mess if that happens.
And the alternative of stuffing them all into one comma-
separated property is unweildy for other reasons. (Plus it
won't be able to address individual background layers, if we
decide to address that.)

I don't have any solutions. I just wanted to point out that we
should look at all these together. It's part of the reason why
I wanted to pull back box-shadow from the css3-background LC:
it's a much bigger problem we're looking at here.

CCing www-svg, please follow-up to www-style.

~fantasai

Received on Tuesday, 13 October 2009 00:33:27 UTC