CSS images module

The CSS WG published a draft of a little CSS module last week, that, so 
I heard, might interest the SVG WG:

    CSS Image Values Module Level 3
    http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-css3-images-20090723/

No doubt you have already seen it, but here is a reminder.

The primary purpose of the module is not very interesting: it simply 
defines a bit of CSS grammar (the "<image>" type) that can be re-used 
in other CSS modules. But the module also contains three other ideas 
that may or may not make it into CSS:

1) Images slices. There are tons of programs to crop an image, but some 
advanced users want to do it on the client side, maybe for efficiency 
or because they like CSS better than Photoshop. SVG, of course, already 
allows to define multiple views of an SVG image and the Media Fragments 
WG is chartered to come up with a generic method for multimedia. One 
could also revise the MIME type registrations for PNG and JPEG to 
define URLs with structured fragment identifiers for those types. Or 
CSS could have its own notation...

2) Image format fallbacks. People writing Web pages take it for granted 
that a graphical browser supports PNG and JPEG. SVG is getting more 
reliable, too. Nevertheless, some people would like to make their 
designs more robust by providing several alternative images in 
different formats and maybe different resolutions as well (because some 
designers loathe image scaling).

3) Sprites. This is for heavy users of images slices. If one arranges 
all the small images in a single large one in such a way that they are 
all the same size and regularly spaced, one can abbreviate the notation 
for the slices: declare the grid once and then refer to each slice by a 
single number.

Are any of these features worth the effort?

If so, are there better places than CSS to handle them?

Anything in SVG that these features need to be compatible with?



Bert
-- 
  Bert Bos                                ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/
  http://www.w3.org/people/bos                               W3C/ERCIM
  bert@w3.org                             2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
  +33 (0)4 92 38 76 92            06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Tuesday, 28 July 2009 10:07:16 UTC