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According to John Dagget ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=875213#c1 ), the `text-outline` property is no longer found in the CSS3 draft, and it's not clear whether or not it continues to be an intended property. I admit I'm not terribly familiar with the CSS3 draft, but it seems like something worth bringing up here.
Thanks, yes, it should be removed and the CSS property list updated.
I brought this up before at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-texttracks/2012Aug/0027.html. If CSS won't have it then WebVTT needs to define it for its own use. Text strokes are a widely-used text styling for captions, since it's the best available way of ensuring captions are visible on all backgrounds without making them unacceptably ugly and intrusive, as WebVTT's current default does. I don't know why it was removed from the CSS spec. (In reply to comment #1) > Thanks, yes, it should be removed and the CSS property list updated. It should definitely not be removed, though perhaps renamed to something namespaced to WebVTT, like webvtt-text-outline, to avoid conflicts later if it's added back to CSS.
Given that the property isn't in a spec and not implemented anywhere, I see nothing to do but remove it from WebVTT: https://github.com/w3c/webvtt/pull/23 I agree with Glenn that this feature is important for WebVTT, but we're going to have to actually do the hard work of getting it into a CSS spec first.
You can use text-shadow for now. An example outline is shown here that needs 4 shadows: http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/text-shadow.en.html . It's clunky, but that's all CSS can offer for now. text-stroke is another options, but it's apparently not standardised yet: http://caniuse.com/text-stroke .
This bug is now resolved as fixed. If someone wants some other (new?) property added to the whitelist, please file a new bug.
Here's a link I got from Tab Atkins for anyone who wants to jump in on the standardization of this feature on the CSS side: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-fx/2014JanMar/0023.html