Flash does quite a bit of the stuff you seem to want all ready, including text shadows. I hate Flash for a lot of reasons. If you work within the constraints of css, you can get a pretty rich website without needing to photoshop everything in sight. If you must photoshop well, there's photoshop. There's a few bitmap-handling tricks I'd like to see added to css though, including transparency, 8-bit alpha channel support, rotation etc..