Kevin, first of all, thanks for the work you and the working group have already done on CSS3. And thanks for opening up (and listening to) additional forums and means of providing feedback other than traditional W3C mailing lists.
I’ll second pretty much everything Jim noted in the third comment. In addition, I’ll emphasize that the two most common uses of gradients are either one color to another color, or one opacity to another opacity of the *same* color.
I’m not sure where you’d start and stop with gradients, as it seems you’d quickly be overlapping roles with SVG. But if gradients were an option, the related property types you may want to consider which may or may not be obvious:
– gradient-type: linear is the obvious default, but radial is also common being useful for creating glows in the center of a box, etc.
– gradient-origin: or use gradient-start-position and gradient-end-position
– gradient-direction: depends on -type and -origin; could be an angle (0 to 360, or 180 to -180) our outside-in/inside-out
– gradient-length: even if a box is 400px in height, I may only want a vertical linear gradient to span the first 50px.
– gradient-start-color and gradient-end-color: possibly used for both color and opacity of that color.
Background-origin sounds potentially useful. Though the current definition is not what I imagined or hoped for. I’ve always thought background-position imposed an unfortunate limitation since px values always originate from the top-left corner. What if I want a background-image positioned 200px away from the right edge, and -50px starting outside the bottom edge of a flexible width/height box?
Expanding the role of background-position may break backward compatibility and understanding. So background-origin might be the property to tweak to determine which corner context is used for background-position values. Maybe use something like “background-edge” for what is currently labeled background-origin?
And border-radius by corner, definitely. Rounding just one corner, or the top two, or the right two, or opposite diagonal corners — all common desires to counter the boxy-ness of CSS-produced designs.
As a final general note, I’ll stress the growing importance of clear specification language. Even though the specs are primarily written for those who build the tools, increasingly, those who build *with and for* the tools are turning to the specifications to learn and understand CSS features — especially in the absence of anything like a CSS3 version of Eric Meyer’s Definitive Guide. Even though I consider myself fairly fluent with the ins and outs of CSS and wordings of past specifications, I’m still confused about the border-image section, even after reading through parts of it 3 or 4 times.
Thanks again for listening.