CSS WG Blog CSS Drop Shadows

CSS Drop Shadows

I’m working on the CSS3 Backgrounds and Borders module with Bert Bos, and
I’d like to start a new Q&A series because I think we need some help: This
time I’ll ask the questions, and you give me answers. Ok? Since the CSS
Working Group Blog currently doesn’t accept comments, CSS3.info and W3C’s
Karl Dubost have kindly allowed me to cross-post so that you can write
back. The first issue is a complicated one, so I’ll start with an easy
question. The topic is drop shadows.

In the latest public working draft we have a box-shadow
property. The point is, obviously, to be able to draw a drop-shadow for a
CSS box. It starts to get complicated once you ask “what happens when there
are semi-transparent parts of the box?” At first we figured ‘box-shadow’
should just draw the shadow as if the box was opaque. Then Dave Hyatt, who
had started implementing this, started questioning that logic. We’ve got
proposals for a ‘border-shadow’ property to shadow just the border and a
‘background-shadow’ property to shadow just the background color (but not
the image?), etc. We could also just “shadow everything drawn in this element”.
This all sounds rather complicated to me so I want to step back and ask:

What do you, the web designers of the world, want to do with shadows?
What’s the end result you want to get?

Show me. Post a few links to stuff from your portfolio that uses anything
beyond pure text shadows, even if it’s all done with pure Photoshop(/Painter/GIMP)
graphics. Draw (or explain) a picture of what you want to achieve. Then
maybe we can figure out how best to make it happen in CSS.

Discuss on www-style,
CSS3.info, W3C Q&A.

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