On big text (so titles, menus, etc) it's fine, and might even make things look good.

And if there's a noisy background image, it can (if done properly) help make things readable.

But for anything that's going to appear in a sig (i.e. small text, plain background), it can't look anything other than shit, and you should be ashamed with yourself for even considering it.

Oh ye of little imagination (fail)

MOD MADNESS :((

Write your sig HTML in a normal HTML document, open it, take a screen shot and save it as a mother fucking GIF and use that for your sig. That'll show the Bougthon. :C

I might make a PHP thing on my site that returns a .bmp, that'd probably annoy him more.

I could do some interesting things if I could use JavaScript, too :C

(giggle)

SVG FTW!

Ok, some of those look nice. But some are a bit 'home DTP app from 1995'.

But ok, I accept that with a bit of imagination and sensitivity it can be used well.

(handshake)

See, this is why I wont play Civ with you, you fucking traitor. :@

:'D

I still have a problem with it. I mean this shit should've worked 5 years ago. But now everyone's so used to doing anything like this in photoshop. And there's no downside to doing it that way, and it's quicker and far more flexible. I kinda feel like CSS should be designed on how we use the web and make sites, not on some ideology of how we should be making the web.

Fuck that! I want alpha-transparency and layers. :@

And I mean properly - with masks and grouping and so on - not having to hack about and save photos as PNGs and stuff.

Applying (text-)shadow should basically be a convenient shortcut to all the stuff that a graphics editor can do.

And then I can just tweak a text file or two, instead of having to output half a dozen images for different screen sizes, and re-generate files because the background is now a different colour.


And yeah, this should all have been done ten years ago. Stupid W3C twats. :@

Yeah but even with all that it's:

a few clicks in photoshop Vs. half an hour of typing, looking, tweaking, typing, looking...

(unless someone makes a visual thing)

The "visual thing" is called Photoshop? :P

Just needs a plugin to read styles from CSS, produce the appropriate image, then save again, instead of worrying about bloated image files.

I dunno, it would be such a small subset of what photoshop does. Would you have a cutdown UI which only allows what CSS can do or would you just make it discard anything not catered for in CSS when you export?

Either way is going to be unsatisfactory for people who know PS but not CSS, which is most of the people who do this sort of thing at most web design/dev places (ones large enough that coders don't design and designers don't code).

The designer is just going to want to use Photoshop and image files because they do far more. You'd be asking them to revert to something on the level of Paint.NET for the sake of saving a few kb?

What? No, I want CSS to be expanded to cater for all the relevant extra functionality.

So when a client says "can we have that in cerulean not navy", it's not a two week wait for the creative dept to get around to it, and a developer can just change one colour and have everything updated.

So you want Photoshop to output to an editable text based format, basically?

 

(SVG?)

I'm sorry to say that I agree with Peter on this. Reworking a whole site's graphics text because of design changes, rather than tweaking CSS, is bonkers. Besides, text (even pretty text) should be text, not graphics.

A visual thing you say? (ironic that it tries very hard to look exactly like Photoshop)

Ok it only does gradients, but still, I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to knock together a text-shadow (or box-shadow) example. In fact, I might just do that...

edit:
Plus, it's more than just "a few clicks in Photoshop" – you first need to create the image, specifying what size you want it, then enter the text, then do a few clicks, then need to upload it to the server in the right place, then change some text files to actually reference the image, then like Peter said, possibly make another version that looks good on a smaller screen.

Also, using CSS like this means you can make your fancy effects big as you like without affecting filesize, and including it in an existing CSS file means one less HTTP request, = faster site.

You're missing my point. Even if there were a visual thing which did everything CSS can currently do, which that certainly isn't, it would be able to do about 0.01% of what Photoshop can do.

As I say, if you want something very trivial or looking like 1990s home-publishing then great, CSS has caught up. If you want something genuinely rich you still have to use Photoshop anyway.

The few clicks thing was clearly hyperbole. For anything beyond the most trivial of decorations, it's going to be far quicker to do with direct manipulation and feedback.



The tiny subset of fancy effects which CSS can now do.



Cos people really notice a 20k hit these days.



1. You're scraping the bottom of the barrel now 2. You're well aware that you can put image data in CSS anyway.

Ok, you're right in that Photoshop can do a lot more than CSS, and for things that need it, it's certainly the preferable tool.

But, and this was kinda my point I guess, not every situation requires it; there are valid situations where using CSS would be a better choice.

It ties into the point Truffy made, too: if the text is integral to the content of the page, then it should be styled with CSS; if not, sure, an image might be better.

And the point about HTTP requests and filesize was that these things often aren't used in isolation: sure, a 20K image is not much to be concerned about, but once you start using them all over the place, the weight starts to add up.

Plus, there are other advantages to using CSS, mostly relating to maintenance: you could use the same basic effects but with different colours for different areas of a site (versus creating different images for each, which yes, I know, could be combined into a sprite and possibly inlined in the CSS), you can animate the CSS (or use Flash, I guess), you can change the text on the fly, perhaps in response to a user login, I dunno. There's lots of things you can do with it that either aren't possible with just images, or that start to get unwieldy (or require Flash).