A big handicap graphic design for the web had to put up with until recently was being limited to a small number of ‘web-safe‘ fonts. These web-safe fonts were the lucky few considered so widespread that the chances of having a visitor that didn’t have them installed were negligible.
The fact that something as primary as the ability to download online fonts was lacking in HTML / CSS for so long made it necessary for third party technology-based hacks (as for instance sIFR) to fill up the gap.
CSS gradients promise a great leap forward for the graphical capabilities of CSS. A CSS gradient is in fact a browser-generated image, consisting of smooth fades between several colors. Letting CSS create these will decrease download times and allows for many new interesting DHTML possibilities.
Both linear and radial gradients are supported by the new CSS specifications. At the time of writing CSS gradients are supported by Mozilla and Webkit browsers but Internet explorer offers something similar in it’s usual non-compliant manner.
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Tags: background, css, CSS3, design, gradient
CSS 3 provides a new collection of column properties that allow you to easily distribute a HTML container’s textual content over multiple vertical columns. At the time of writing this property is supported by Mozilla and Webkit browsers, and -moz / -webkit vendor prefixes are still needed.
CSS 3 allows you to add drop shadows to text. The text-shadow property’s syntax doesn’t require vendor specific prefixes. That means this method for adding shadows behind text is finalized.
Tags: css, CSS3, drop shadow
CSS 3 finally delivers specifications for the rounding of corners. CSS 3 allows you to specify a radius for the corners of an element. This offers the promise of no longer having to use awkward rounded corner / border hacks based on images or CSS / JavaScript for such a simple graphic effect.
At the time of writing Internet Explorer’s latest version (8) still doesn’t support this feature in any way. Also CSS vendor prefixes are still necessary for Mozilla (FireFox) and WebKit (Safari/Chrome) based browsers. Surely the vendor-specific prefixes and syntactical quirks will also disappear once the application of this CSS3 feature becomes more commonplace.
CSS 3 allows us to add drop shadows using the box-shadow directive. The box shadow directive is for creating drop shadows on box-model elements, eliminating the need for background images or JavaScript solutions to achieve this effect. The box shadow directive is not for adding shadows to text. To add drop shadow to text nodes you should use the the text-shadow directive.
Box-shadow takes 3 lengths and a color as it’s attributes, the lengths are:
Tags: background, css, CSS3, drop shadow
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This blog is maintained by Joris Osterhaus.
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