Yeah, I absolutely agree with you that what you desribe is conceptually preferable. It'll make the internet better.

And I think the companies who are mainly of the internet - Google and Twitter and so on, will do it the right way.

But the sort of stuff I work on is shocking. I think your head would explode if you saw some of the stuff I work on (for companies like VMG, Warner, EA, Sony, Fox). Big lumbering companies who do not understand the internet at all and there's so many layers of hierarchy between the person who decided X thing should have a site and the person who's getting me to do it. And they get instructions from higher up that they follow without question. Like someone higher up probably said 'I heard flash is cool these days, we should have something like that' and by the time it gets to me it's 'the whole site MUST be in flash'.

There was a site I worked on recently and one in a litany of fuckwitted decisions from higher up was that they wanted quite rich animated menus in flash. I told them I could do them in CSS and it would be a lot easier (cos the site needed internationalising, and that's obviously a pain in the arse in flash) and... just better in every way. But no, they insisted on flash.

Another one was a site which needed translating into 7 languages. It was quite a dynamic, database driven site. So I said - easiest way to do translations was just isolate all the strings in the database and pull the right ones in dynamically, using mod rewrite to keep it all tidy. But no, they insisted that they wanted the entire site replicating 7 times. I pushed for this several times - explaining at length how it was simply better and, as far as the end user was concerned, totally absolutely identical - and every time they came back with no, it must be physically copied 7 times (including several hundred mb of video content which they wouldn't even let me symlink).

It's totally nuts.

I guess I'm lucky working for a company that at least has a say in how things are implemented, and a boss who generally knows his stuff :O The only downside is having to support IE7 (at least on my current project; I think others have to support 6 too, although I think we charge extra for that).

Your "make websites easier to read" plugin would be kinda fucked if all the headings were in photoshopotext though, wouldn't it? Unless you do clever things with alt-text I guess.

On the kinda sites I'm talking about, it'd be fucked altogether, yeah, we're not really talking about headers as such. Just very 'rich' websites.

But the standard approach of people who know what they're doing is to use the image as a background image and have the text there, but invisible. That way you're not fucking over screen readers etc..

I think it's about the nature of companies. If they're a tech-based comapny (or small) they tend to understand stuff better (or can be made to).

Aye. We (pH Group) are a relatively small company, although now we're part of Experian so maybe the future won't be so rosy.

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..

Rotation is there, at least in some browsers - check "transform" command.