1) I’m on the fence about gradients — on the one hand, I’d love them – but the fact that I won’t be able to likely control all elements of the tonality (such as illustrator and photoshop), most likely, means I’ll probably end up just doing it myself graphically. Might be good for some low end users?
2) I only find background size redundant — I see users loading up huge images and just resizing it with their CSS… havock on download times. Stretch does seem like a better name, too — not as confusing as mixing it with the size of the containing element. However, I can see how we’re also adding an extra useless term into the mix.
3) Position I can find useful, but it is something that can be done without CSS. I don’t think clip will be too useful for me atleast — as it’s just hiding larger downoad times than anything, I should be doing it in an image editor. Unless, of course, if I clip an element to round and my text will flow to that shape, or if I can clip using text (mask the image with dynamic content)? Then you’ve gained a tool similar to using InDesign, or Quark if you’re old school. To counter, clipping to a border is a nice featureset.
4) Isn’t that close to choosing content for your choice of background origin, and them manipulating the position?
5) Yes. If I want a bottom left, top right rounded corner, and the other two square without using images, there you go. You could use a background image for this, but that’s another redundant image. Unlike my gradient complaint, I would have full control over radius, so I don’t see a limitation.
No chance in controlling my border dots/dashes using math to control the spacing or dash/dot size? Illustrator as an example. That’s just icing, but would be nice.
Inner Shadow someday would be a cool effect as well for a box element.
Either way, shadows, gradients, and all of the image borders/backgrounds I can see turning web pages into a scary production for the home designer!
Thanks for the opportunity to post!