Comments on: Creating a Text Drop Shadow without using CSS3

By: Jeremy Carlson

Jeremy Carlson — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 17:19:05 +0000

For those posting stats, those numbers change depending on the site. A client of mine has 60% using IE. Yet for mine 57% are using FF, so you can’t go by numbers based on any one site. It has to be taken into context.

That said, while this is an ok idea, I’m with everyone else. Use CSS3, and let the rest degrade gracefully. I’m not about to add extra divs to get a simple effect most users are not going to notice, and ones in IE won’t know it’s missing.

By: Elliot

Elliot — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 17:27:55 +0000

Yeh, there are loads of pros and cons to using this. Like Jennifer R said, duplicates could be removed and yes I agree, we should use CSS3 more but the rate of new browsers being released is increasing and for some people their default browser of IE on their Windows copy is enough for them. It depends on the site we’re creating for, if its for a market for people who want to learn how to use a computer(!) then the chances of them using a different browser to their default is small. There is definitely an increase in people being able to use computers and years to come this will probably be an easy task for anyone.
If you want to validate to your style-sheets though then filters will pop up errors.

At the end of the day its what method works best for the situation!

By: Matthew Leak

Matthew Leak — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 22:12:09 +0000

i’m with Ben on this one. We should be encouraging developers to be using CSS3, not adding more ‘unnecessary’ markup than is needed to stylesheets.

I suppose it’s a good technique to use in IE-only stylesheets. But then again, if the developer is using browser-specific stylesheets then he/she will probably know how to achieve the text-shadow in iE using filters. Or if not, they will *probably* have the sense to a little bit of Googling. meh.

That said though, it’s a pretty good technique Elliot.

By: Hein

Hein — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 06:46:54 +0000

@Abhin

This is indeed true but we have to stay open for other ways, so in my opinion it’s helpful for beginners who don’t know how to use those IE filters to create these effects.

By: Abhin

Abhin — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 19:58:52 +0000

nice technique though it is better to use CSS3 for such support and you can achieve text shadow in IE using filters. This technique is impractical for real world situations, anyways good try

By: Zetura

Zetura — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 13:15:35 +0000

This can be simplified :

Your textYour text>

And CSS :

.text_container{ position: relative; color: #333; } .text_container span{ color: #bababa; position: absolute; display: block; top: -1px; left: -1px; }

By: Jennifer R

Jennifer R — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 12:25:19 +0000

be caution, maybe your website be banned of duplicated content while using this technique

By: Benjamin Reid

Benjamin Reid — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 10:13:39 +0000

Well for May 2010 32.2% (IE6 + IE7 + IE8) of people used a browser that doesn’t support text-shadow (text-shadow support: http://www.quirksmode.org/css/contents.html#t47), where as 67.1% (Firefox + Chrome + Safari + Opera) supported text-shadow. So the majority actually support it.

The point I was trying to get across was that text degrades just fine if text-shadow isn’t supported – unless it’s part of layout and causes display issues.

By: Elliot

Elliot — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 08:31:53 +0000

Yes, I agree that people should upgrade their browsers! But if you look at these browser stats then you can see a lot of people still use browsers without CSS3

By: Benjamin Reid

Benjamin Reid — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 07:59:51 +0000

A nice idea but we should be encouraging people to use CSS3 not add more markup to their HTML causing further load times. Besides, if a browser doesn’t support the text-shadow property, it degrades just fine (unless the drop shadow is crucial to the design of course).