San Bei Ji

Me and My Shadow

What Do I Know - Text-Shadow in Safari 1.1

Just for fun - I popped in a bit of text-shadow into my CSS file for this site’s default “Sunrise” theme. (It’s actually a sunset, but I was in an especially positive mood that day and decided to pretend it was a sunrise…) For those lucky users of Safari on Mac OS X 10.3, you will see the extra treat. Safari does a damn good job of implementing this property, and it is the first web browser to do so. Cool! Prior to this implementation, a web designer would have to create image files in a program such as Photoshop, Fireworks, or GIMP. So the implications of this for a web designer are huge - just add a simple line of CSS and you have all your H1 tags set to magically appear to hover above the page. Saves bandwidth too - less additional image files to download on the client side.

The obvious potential drawback for text-shadow is of course that different browser vendors will undoubtedly create different implementations of the property. I can see opacity being the biggest variation here. But still, what a cool tool. Too bad it’s only Safari 1.1 and higer at this point. I bet Gecko-based browsers will catch up eventually. And maybe, someday, in the next ten years, Microsoft will release an update to IE.”

Tags: Mac OS X