Gradients: yes, gradients would be nice, but are non-essential. I’d love to have them as long as they didn’t take time & energy away from more essential things. Really I’d like CSS to allow me to do in stylesheets just about anything that I can now do with Fireworks or Photoshop. That’d be great, but what would be the cost!? Would it make browsers way too bloated, and slow on all but the newest machines? Would it make CSS seem too complex to newbies? Gradients are to me in this category. Bring ’em on if it’s not going to cost too much, and bring on just about everything else that a graphics tool can do that would make any sense to do now in our CSS rules, but not if the cost is too great. There are already good ways to manipulate images dynamically on the server if needed, and most of what we do with images is static anyway, so we don’t really NEED gradients or any other things that are funamentally matters of manipulating images. But they could certainly be nice.
Curved corners are, to me, on the other hand, essential. Having to use images to achieved boxes with curved corners is—in my opinion—a kludge. Having to use images to achieve gradients is, on the other hand, natural, since gradients are generally just background images. Making gradients with images is very quick and easy, even for a novice. Making boxes with curved corners is only easy if you’re following an example or have done it before, and too often this is done with tables. It totally makes sense that you should be able to specify curved corners (and YES, each corner needs to be able to be specified independently).
I know it would result in lots of web pages that look like “Word Art” (as in Microsoft Word) but if we get gradients, they should also be able to be applied to any element, not just backgrounds of boxes.
Another thing I think CSS needs is text that can be written at any angle, not just horizontally. And while we’re at it, why not text along any curved path. And while we’re at it, let’s just merge SVG into XHTML, and style it all with CSS… but I digress…