CSS Drop Shadows

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Published in Browsers, CSS, Graphic Design

They’re the corkscrew in every graphic designer’s Swiss Army knife. Much used, oft maligned but always popular, drop shadows are a staple of graphic design. Although easy to accomplish with image-editing software, they’re not of much use in the fast-changing world of web design. On the web, adaptability and ease of use dictate trends — and static images with a fixed background effect are not very adaptable.

Article Continues Below
Article Continues Below

But what if we had a technique to build flexible CSS drop shadows that can be applied to arbitrary block elements? That can expand as the content of the block changes shape? Compatible with most modern browsers? With better results for standards-compliant browsers? If you’re not sold yet, we can also tell you that it requires minimal markup.

Interested? Well, first off, we wouldn’t want to take credit for something we didn’t invent, but merely improved upon. This particular technique was conceived and demonstrated by Dunstan Orchard, of 1976 design fame (hats off to you, Dunstan). We found it was easy, intuitive, and worked like a charm. However, after closer examination, we saw room for improvement and set to work on it.

Here’s how it works: you need to make a drop shadow image in the image editor of your choice. It should be only the shadow, without a visible border (an easy way to do this is by applying the effect to an empty selection). Make sure your image is big enough to cover the maximum expected size of the block elements that will use it. In practice, we’ve found that 800 x 800 is a respectable enough size. Save it as a GIF, making sure you use the color of the background you’ll apply the effect over. Additionally, save the same shadow with full alpha transparency (no background color) as PNG. This will be used to feed a better shadow to browsers capable of displaying it. These are some sample files: GIF file/PNG file.

test

We’ll start by giving a shadow to an image and then move on to other block elements. In a moment of ingenuity, we decided to name our class “img-shadow”. Our test subject shall be this cute cat:

And its corresponding markup (one div is the only extra markup we’ll need):


<div class="img-shadow">
  <img src="cat.jpg" alt="test"/>
</div>

The following illustration shows how the technique works:

Technique illustration


First, our previously prepared shadow file will be set as background for the div.

background: url(shadow.gif) no-repeat bottom right;

Then we’ll give the image negative top and left margins to make the “drop” that gives us the shadow. Our shadow is six pixels wide, so that’s our magic value.

margin: -6px 6px 6px -6px;

We float the div to avoid having to specify its size (otherwise it will take up all available horizontal space).

Remember we said that we’d provide better shadows for better browsers? This line will do the trick:

background: url(shadowAlpha.png) no-repeat right bottom !important;

That “!important” bit tells the browser that the declaration is to take precedence over normal declarations for the same element (see the spec). It also happens to be unsupported in all versions of Internet Explorer, which also lack native support for transparent PNG’s. It’s almost too convenient. By specifying controversial declarations twice, we get the desired behavior (IE takes the second one, most other browsers the first one). The end result is that, were the background color to change, browsers that support PNG would maintain a perfectly transparent shadow. Sadly, Explorer’s shadow will stay with its original background color.

But why do this you ask? The reasons are twofold:

  • We can: This is a painless, effortless and automatic hack that yields great results in the browsers that support it.
  • It may fix itself: If the new version of Internet Explorer (shipping with Longhorn) supports both of these standards, we won’t have to fix a thing to get pixel-perfect, truly transparent shadows in it.

The finished CSS code looks like this:


.img-shadow {
  float:left;
  background: url(shadowAlpha.png) no-repeat bottom right !important;
  background: url(shadow.gif) no-repeat bottom right;
  margin: 10px 0 0 10px !important;
  margin: 10px 0 0 5px;
  }

.img-shadow img {
  display: block;
  position: relative;
  background-color: #fff;
  border: 1px solid #a9a9a9;
  margin: -6px 6px 6px -6px;
  padding: 4px;
  }

Differences in margin size account for IE’s box model, and that last padding value gives us a nice frame around the image. Sadly, it is lost in IE 5.5 and 5.0. The drop shadow effect stays, though.

Our shadow will blend seamlessly with its background in standards-compliant browsers. In Explorer, the shadow will clash with the background unless you’ve stuck with the background color you used for your shadow. You can see the results here:

A cute cat
A cute cat

For the next part, we’ll apply the drop shadow effect to a paragraph.

Logic dictates that the same technique should yield similar results when working with a paragraph, which can be treated as another block element. And indeed, with most browsers, it works like a charm. Care to guess which one doesn’t get it right?

While developing this technique, we found that when working with a block element other than an image, in bold defiance of common sense, Explorer decided to clip the left and top parts of the block — the ones that “jump” out of the shadow — regardless of what we tried. Amusingly enough, the only version of Explorer that gets this right is 5.0. No amount of hacks, overflow settings, or gentle suggestions seemed to help (and yes, righteous cursing was tried). We gave up and decided that a different approach was called for.

The method we came up with is partly based on Douglas Bowman’s Sliding Doors methodology, and calls for an extra bit of markup (another div), so our paragraph will look like this:


<div class="p-shadow">
  <div>
    <p>The rain in Spain ...</p>
  </div>
</div>

Instead of giving the paragraph negative top and left margins, we’ll give it positive right and bottom padding. This will expose the shadow (set as background for the outermost div). Then we’ll fake the shadow offset by using a partly transparent GIF as background for the inner div, which will overlap the shadow. Make sure that the visible part of this image is the same color as the background over which you use the drop shadow effect. Name the image “shadow2.gif”. It should be constructed as follows:

Fake offset image example


Here’s an example GIF file (this image will most likely look as white on white on your browser, so you may want to save it and take a look at it in your image editing program).

This illustration shows what we’re going to do:

Paragraph technique illustration


The following are the styles needed to accomplish the effect. Notice that the extraneous image and padding are used only by Internet Explorer. Most other browers effectively ignore the inner div, and stick with the method we used for the drop shadow of the image.


.p-shadow {
  width: 90%;
  float:left;
  background: url(shadowAlpha.png) no-repeat bottom right !important;
  background: url(shadow.gif) no-repeat bottom right;
  margin: 10px 0 0 10px !important;
  margin: 10px 0 0 5px;
  }

.p-shadow div {
  background: none !important;
  background: url(shadow2.gif) no-repeat left top;
  padding: 0 !important;
  padding: 0 6px 6px 0;
  }

.p-shadow p {
  color: #777;
  background-color: #fff;
  font: italic 1em georgia, serif;
  border: 1px solid #a9a9a9;
  padding: 4px;
  margin: -6px 6px 6px -6px !important;
  margin: 0;
  }

The same considerations for background color mentioned in the image example apply for paragraphs. Here’s the end result. (Try resizing the text on your browser to see the box change size and watch the shadow adjust.)

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.



Additional notes

In this article, the styles for image and paragraph have been broken up for clarity, but both could be specified in one fell swoop with minor adjustments.

This technique has been tested with Gecko-based browsers, Safari, Opera and IE 5.0+. Apart from the differences noted, no problems were observed. It should work well with most of the stuff out there (no, not Netscape 4.x).

Acknowledgements

To Dunstan for inventing the drop shadow techique and Douglas Bowman for the Sliding Doors technique

About the Author

Sergio Villarreal

Sergio Villarreal lives in México but spends most of the time in his head. He maintains a weblog and rarely updated webcomic at Overcaffeinated.net and makes a point of learning a new trick every day. Some are even useful.

82 Reader Comments

  1. I was just readin this on Dunstans site this morning! nice one!

    Now every site to appear on the css-vault with be full of even more drop shadows!

    good technique!

    check out clagnut.org for another version of this.

  2. I was looking at the code used for other block element. It’s cool the solution you have got. But it seems like it should not be that hard. Especially considering how easy it is with images.

    Now, I am used to IE being strange with negative margins. It doesn’t like block elements being moved to ‘appear’ outside another block element. It will stop the inner element from going back further that the outer block element, and will force the outer block element to increase in width to compensate for the width of the inner block element. I have seen this before. And what I did for this bug was drop the negative margin idea, and start using posistion:relative, with top: -6px; and left: -6px;.

    I gave it a go (http://wubbleyew.com/tests/dropshadows.htm) and it works great in IE, but for some reason falls over with firefox.

    What’s wrong with it? In my head it should logically work. But firefox seems to add extra padding about and below the floating div.

    Any ideas people?

    Phil Baines

  3. This is a fantastic lightweight technique for generating the effect, but there’s room for a bit of improvement — the “ends” of the drop shadow (in the example used, the top and left “arms” of the drop shadow) terminate with a sharp edge, rather than a soft blur as a “real” drop shadow would. Also, as set up, this only works for drop shadows in a particular direction (to the bottom right). Fortunately, these limitations aren’t inherent to the CSS, but only to the specific shadow image used, which is itself truncated and set up for bottom right only.

    A more aesthetic, and more general, approach would be to create the drop shadow image file with a symmetrical shadow effect all around its edges, essentially, a grey rectangle with all its edges feathered. Doing this would get rid of the truncated end effect, and would also allow, by modifying only the CSS, shadows in directions other than bottom right.

  6. With safari you can use the CSS2 text-shadow property for text (text-shadow: black 0px 0px 5px). There is also a proposed property, box-shadow, in CSS3 for a drop-shadows.
    We will just have to use this method from the article until then.

  13. Phil: Your approach seems great! Have you tried it in browsers other than IE and Firefox? (and in earlier versions of Explorer).

    Michael: A feathered rectangle wouldn’t provide the smooth border on top and left of the shadow. The image is essentially clipped at those points. A way to do that would be to resize the background to the size of the div, but that would require extra markup and may not look good. The full shadow idea is good. I thought about that but for the article I wanted to keep it simple, so I didn’t go deeper into the possibilities.

    Lim: That wouldn’t give you a smooth shadow. It would be a one colour, rather drab thing I believe.

    David: I know. I’m ashamed =). We could add the inline-block property (mentioned in one of the comments at Web Graphics for correctness.

  14. Phil:
    Nice work. I had the same idea as you (using positioning) while reading the article and at first expected that as the second solution. However, I do see one minor problem. There is no way to impliment the solution I suggest below. However, your method does allow a change to the background color without having to also change the color of the ‘Fake Offset Image’ as Sergio calls it. Hey, why not demonstrate that in your test page?

    Michael:
    I also noticed, and didn’t care for the sharp edges on the top and left. Using PNG’s opacacy (spelling?) you could have the edge of the ‘Fake Offset Image’ fade to transparent rather that the sharp edge used in the example. If done correctly, the edges would appear to fade into the background as a real shadow does. Then use the same technique to replace the PNG with the GIF in IE. That way the only difference between IE and other browsers is that sharp edge. A minor difference that can easily be overlooked and will never be noticed by most.

  15. Sergio: nope. i havnt got any other browsers installed on my home machine at the moment. its a new build. if anyone wants to test it in other browsers, give it a go, and let me know (phil#gnasp.com replace(#,@) 🙂 )

    waylman: yeh, I might update it later tonight to have a few different background colours.

  18. (I apologize up front, I posted this on the other article here as well by mistake, but perhaps it pertains there as well too.)

    Perhaps I missed it, or don’t understand the concept fully, but wouldn’t creating a GIF as large as some of the ones discussed here cause problems with page loading times and all?

    Also, I just want say thanks for all the great info here, from both the article authors and the other folks responding to them. I have learned more here than in any class or book!

    Thanks.

  19. Critter:
    That may be true but background images are the last thing donwloaded (at least last time I checked) So the content will display quickly and the user could begin reading before the images finish downloading. Purhaps you have noticed this on this site when using a slow (dialup) connection. Go ahead, clear your cache and try it. The text should appear over the gray(ish) backgroung and then the white will appear behind it.

  20. Critter: The images used are really small in file size. The GIF is 4.26 kb in all. The actual image size doesn’t affect this much because of the way GIF stores information (making the image 1600×1600 would hardly increase file size). And, as has been pointed out, backgrounds are the last thing loaded, so that shouldn’t be a worry.

  21. But there is a CSS filter for this:
    DropShadow Filter
    Oh yeah I forgot. God forbid ALA would publish something that works on Internet Explorer. Lol. I don’t know who that insults; ALA or IE.

  22. I do most of my reseach on this site and it’s articles at work where I have access to a fairly fast connection. But I’ll try it at home too where I’m forced to use a dial-up connection and see what happens there.

    Thanks a bunch for the clarification!

    Now I know what I want my site to be when it grows up!

  23. your snippet of code is a bit old and amounts to a slander of IE. The IE filter that produces the very nice shadows talked about in the article is:

    filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(direction=135,color=#aaaaaa,strength=3);

    Far more subtle, don’t you think?

  24. Discuss this article. OK then. Here’s a good tip – don’t use drop shadows on your web pages. Concentrate on making your site navigable, usable and well indexed and leave special effects and crap for the likes of print designers. Another good tip is to NOT make your site constrained to a particular width, like this one, as it sucks of print design.

  25. Rob, if you don’t have something constructive to say…at least stay on-topic. Fixed width vs. liquid layouts *both* have their place – as do drop shadows on occasion. I don’t think every site on the web should have them, and neither does the author.
    Sites that *only* focus on navigation and usability at the expense of all visual craftmanship are soulless and boring. The craft of web design requires both halves of our collective brains to produce engaging experiences online. I appreciate ALA for contributing to both sides of my gray matter, whether or not I use every cutting-edge technique and tactic in their library. Code monkeys and designers need each other!

  26. What I *really* meant to say when I arrived =), was that ImageMagick, GD and PHP can automatically generate drop shadows on images. While I realize this goes against the grain of the discussion, it is a method that might be considered if all the images are being processed already or are dynamically generated and in a database. No extra markup or CSS to deal with, at least.
    An example PHP library:
    http://php.amnuts.com/index.php?do=view&id=9
    Just food for thought!

  27. I’m glad Webmonkey is dead. I’ll give my reasons for this in an upcoming article. You’ll see why I am dancing on its grave. I seem to be the only one, but I have valid reasons.
    That filter stuff is outdated. The only filters I use in practice are the blendTrans and revealTrans, and that’s rare. I just like the Page Transitions. That’s enough of a filter for me, or anyone else.
    Rob, ALA has just published some accessibility and structure articles. Now they’re publishing some “wow-factor” articles. I must say I do like that balance. I kinda agree; I found it a tad pointless, but at least there is some documented way as to how drop shadows are done.

  29. Yeh i have seen that before. Its a good version, but not as effective. you dont get a fade effect. a proper shadow fades.

    Im sure that they dont need to posistion the first div either;

    .shadowbox {
    background: #ccc;
    }

    plus 2px doesnt really show very much. i recommend a bit more.

    .shadowbox div {
    background: #333;
    border: 2px solid #000;
    color: #fff;
    padding: 10px;
    position: relative;
    top: -3px;
    left: -3px;
    }

    if just testes it my editing thier code using the firefox css-edit plugin, and it works.

  31. Dante-Cubed wrote:
    >>>
    Oh yeah I forgot. God forbid ALA would publish something that works on Internet Explorer.
    <<< Your personal vendetta against ALA is getting boring. I'm sure every ALA reader has noticed how upset you are that your article didn't get published. FYI, ALA has published lots of non-standard tricks for IE only, as parts of larger articles. They won't publish articles that ONLY deal with IE-specifics, because they wish to educate their readers on designing for all browsers instead of just one, whether it be IE, Mozilla, Opera or something else. You have already informed us that you don't agree with this goal, and you don't need to tell us again.

  32. Of course I want everything to work on all browsers, but come on now: that’s impossible. I do try but I believe IE should be the top priority, since it’s the by far most used browsers.
    I don’t write web development articles anymore anyway, so I don’t care. I write about San Francisco History (http://geocities.com/dc_sfhe).
    If you actually read my posts, you’ll see that I complimented ALA in my last post.

  33. Dante:
    >>>
    Of course I want everything to work on all browsers, but come on now: that’s impossible.
    <<< By "you don't agree with this goal", I meant that you disagree with ALA's decision to use browser-specific and non-standard code sparingly, at the expense of not getting to use a lot of extra functionality. IE (6) *should* be top priority, and it *can* be top priority without adding lots of IE-specific code. >>>
    If you actually read my posts, you’ll see that I complimented ALA in my last post.
    <<< I saw. And if you had read older articles, you'd have seen that ALA *have* published "something that works on Internet Explorer", unless you meant a *whole article* about something that *only* works in IE. Thing is, I didn't say you were incapable of complimenting ALA, and I think you *have* read older articles, possibly missing the IE-specific non-standard parts. Compliments or not: this is not the first time you bring it up. Considering that your article, if memory serves me correct, was rejected because it was too IE-specific, I can't see any other reason for you to keep bringing it up, than personal reasons. I apologize if I'm wrong, but it'd be a weird coincidence. At any rate, it doesn't need to be brought up again, any more than you need to criticize a fantasy adventure movie for not being a documentary about dogs. Not being too browser-specific is part of the definition of ALA, not an oversight that needs to be reported.

  34. My article’s script gave IE users a little extra. Other Modern Browser users still got the rest of the script. It wasn’t *completely* IE specific at all.

    The script inserted a “Highlight All” button before every Textarea in the document. Clicking it highlighted the textarea text, but in IE it asked the user if he/she also wanted to copy the text to his or her clipboard.
    I want to make sure everyone can see my pages; that is my goal. Putting IE as my top priority is part of that goal.

  36. Ok, Marat, you can add the shadows with Photoshop, but what if you don’t like the shadows anymore in the future, and you’ll have to edit every single shadowed images of your site (removing the shadows)? This technique talks about forward-compatibility.

  37. Nice! But one funny thing: when I use this class in an MT-post, I have to enter a lot of BR’s to get the text UNDER the image. What am I missing?

  38. Henk: Since the container div is floated, you need to add an element with clear:both; after it. You can add a br with style=”clear:both;”. That should do the trick.

  39. Thanks Sergio but I’m a CSS-n00b, so I quote:

    “If you have no clue in using it, don’t!”,

    so I deleted it from my page. Guess I have to learn a whole lot more…

  42. I don’t like the shadow top-right and left-bottom. There is a hard darkgray/white border and in real world there is soft shadow border all around the image.
    The same physical phenomenon causing soft shadow on right and bottom sides works on left and top sides.

  43. Andrej: That’s something that can’t really be avoided. It could be made to work by using the second approach (the fake offset one) with a PNG that vanishes gradually. It would only work for non-IE browsers, though, and would lose the advantage of having the shadow adjust to its background color (since the “vanishing” has to be on one color). I may make an example of this later…

  45. Well Dunstan has written this in 2003! LOL and there are 4 variants(that I am aware of) to this trick as of date. But still a good one at that.

  46. Well… he wrote it in November of 2003. That’s less than 4 months ago. Not exactly ancient history, even by internet standards. But yeah, it’s been around a while.

  47. In follow-up to Wazungu message on the 27th Feb; the class linked to, in all fairness, doesn’t actually create the drop-shadow on the fly. Instead it uses a pre-defined set of shadows images to give the illusion that the image in question has had a drop-shadow applied to it. The result is meant to replicate something like you would get in PhotoShop/Gimp, and as such the image is then saved (or just displayed – you don’t have to save it) with the drop-shadow attached.

    I believe ImageMagick can create drop-shadows on the fly, but I am not sure of the quality or fading ability, because I’ve never tried it. There is no (easy) ability in GD to create a drop-shadow, that I’m aware of. I have tried an on-the-fly version using PHP and GD, but the result was much too slow for my liking (and not terribly good, either!)

  48. Really nice article! Perhabs there is Non-script approach to fix the IE problem with Alpha-PNGs.
    Consider to use IE-specific Conditional Comments and use the Alpha-Image Filter discussed in another ALA article to “activate” the alpha channel of the PNG in Internet Explorer. This should work and I am using this solution on my own site:

    (The is only a CR and should be removed)

    Hope this works and I really appreciate your comments…

  50. Andy, great points. What you say about that technique is interesting, I hadn’t heard of that approach. I have seen it done properly before – I recall on Kmart’s photo lab site, the images had visually correct dropshadows that were dynamically generated, and I worked on an HP project that did the same. However, I didn’t implement them myself (just a designer, not a coder). It is my belief that it *can* be done.

    Whether or not it *should* be is up to you readers! =)

  51. I know I keep nudging the conversation off-topic, but I just can’t resist! The issues surrounding visual techniques such as this cut across mediums, from print to web to animation and video.
    If only drop shadows were as easy as this Flash Actionscript class: http://www.quasimondo.com/archives/000184.php
    Saved my bacon on a Flash presentation with a bunch of dynamically loaded (and variable-sized) images.
    Play with the sliders (above), and dream of CSS3…

  56. David House wrote:
    > Floats need an explicit width.
    >
    > “We float the div to avoid having to specify
    > its size (otherwise it will take up all
    > available horizontal space).”
    >
    > Tut tut, this is a hack.

    The current method of setting a float on a box, but not setting an explicit width, so that the box is rendered only as wide as its contents may be incorrect at the moment (although it passes CSS validation) but that will change very soon.

    As all modern browsers, except IE5/Mac & Opera, render this CSS as desired, the W3C has responded by modifying the float requirement in CSS 2.1 (currently a Candidate Recommendation, implying it will be a full Recommendation imminently).

    CSS 2.1 effectively says that providing you set width:auto when floating a box, your CSS is valid and boxes can be rendered as wide as their content (‘shrink-to-fit’) – the desired behaviour.

    http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/CR-CSS21-20040225/visudet.html#q8

    The W3C should be applauded for making this concession/acknowledgement of how real-life designers use CSS.

  60. Great technique and article, Sergio!

    However, I found one flaw in the technique that I wasn’t able to fix. Namely, the drop shadow breaks when the photo is centered in a table cell (e.g. in a photo album index page), unless all the photos in the same column are of exactly the same width.

    The shadow gets ok if I put another div around the img-shadow div, but then the image is not centered in the cell anymore.

    OK, OK, I know I shouldn’t maybe use tables, but for grids like this I’ve yet to find any better way. Besides, even when trying to use only div’s for the layout I still couldn’t center the image nicely in the surrounding div.

    Could someone please give me a hint how to center the shadowed image inside another element without breaking anything?

    TIA,
    Jarkko

  61. I’ve got strange problem. Msie 6 does not display http://www.jpd.sk/ page after load, you have to move mouse over top menu to show contents. Other pages on this site uses the same css and page structure, but displays ok. Suggestions?

  62. Great article and technique, thanks Sergio. I tried it on my pages and it worked great, except in IE6/XP. After a lot of pissing around with test cases I discovered that if the page has an xml declaration at the top ie: , then the “padding: 4px;” at the end of the “.img-shadow img” style rule is ignored. Everything works except the image has no padding inside the frame. Wierd. I assume this has something to do with IE’s quirks mode. Anyone else seen this?

  63. Dunc: I ran into the same problem while writing the article. Specifying an XHTML transitional doctype makes IE6 display the padding correctly. Other doctypes result in the behavior you get in IE5 and IE5.5 (padding applied to image elements doesn’t show). I’d assume that XHTML 1.0 transitional and up would work.

  64. I wonder whose fault that is…

    When IE6 goes into Strict Modes it uses the W3C Model. Since this box model makes no sense, stick to Quirks Mode.

    Need I say more?

  65. I don’t think that has anything to do with it, Dante, or other browsers that implement the Box Model as per the w3c standard wouldn’t show the padding. I think it’s Quirks mode itself that causes Explorer to dismiss the padding.

  66. Why use an image? Just create a box with gray bg. Image is only useful when the shadow is to be blurred (which normally seems to be the case).

    But if we put shadow-image with blurred shadow, it will break-up into pixels if we write a 40 line paragraph for instance!

  69. It seems to me that the extra PNG is useless. I don’t want IE to have ugly shadows, where the background colors clash. I want my site to look good in all of todays browsers.

    Sure, going past IE is great, but not in this case. I can’t tolerate the ugly drop shadows on my site. I think I’ll just learn what my background color is and adjust the shadow to that color for now…

  70. sergio,

    thanks for your great article. i am now implementing this drop technique on a site i’m building for a friend — works great in ie5.x/6win ns7win and safari, but not so in mac ie 5.2. not sure why. the div and the image disappear above the view port (you can barely make out the drop .gif along the top).

    see an example here: http://www.lesliebrothers.biz/

    here’s the html:

  71. Sergio,

    Great article. Of course I went to try it out and it works fabulously. I have an image in the

  72. Andy: when a block element is created, by default it assumes all available horizontal space. That is what you’re seeing (with the shadow going all the way to the right). The float, in this case, is very necessary. The element can be floated to left or right, it doesn’t matter, but it *does* have to be floated. Thus, positioning of the image must be done through fiddlement of the margin values.

    If you want to center the image you’ll have to enclose it in another div and center that.

    I’m working on some improvements of the technique, so there may be more to talk about later =)

  73. Sergio,

    Thanks for the reply. I took out the style=”float:none;” from the div and wrapped the img-shadow div like so.

    And the image does not center. It floats to the left. Am I not centering the enclosing div properly?

    I look forward to improvements in the drop shadow technique because it’s great.

    Andy

  75. Sergio,

    You’re my hero. Andy Budd’s page worked. It only took me 30 min to figure it out though. I added 2 divs around the object to be centered with the following css

    .centerWrap
    {
    min-width: 400px;
    text-align: center;
    }

    .center
    {
    margin: 0 auto;
    text-align: left;
    width: 250px;
    }

    Andy’s width of 600px didn’t seem to center the image for me but using a smaller width of 250px and a min width depending upon how narrow you’re willing to let your browser window collapse seems to work great.

    Thanks. Now can’t there be a simpler way?

    The only problem I see is in Camino 0.7 I loose part of the drop shadow. 🙁

    Andy

  77. I really think you guys are doing a great job coming up with solutions in CSS.

    I really which that CSS actually separated content from presentation though. If CSS really worked than all you should need in the HTML is

    Anything more just shows that CSS needs another iteration or two before it really delivers the promise of separating content from presentation.

    To take it even further, if CSS really worked then using only image tags all with the same class you could be able to format a gallery as in









    and have that show up in any format you want. 9 images vertically, 3 by 3, some other format including all the styles in iPhoto all only by changing the CSS.

    Who do we have to influence to get this thing done right?

  79. hello everyone…

    i’ve tested this script. it works fine when its in the tag.

    but when its within another

    tag.. it looks very weird!

    anyone experienced this before?

    cheers,

    vincent

  82. For those Safari users, once you update your OS to 10.3.4 (which brings Safari 1.2.2 I guess, or at least updates it), you will notice that your dropshadows (using the technique in this article) are aligned all the way left, so there’s no right-side shadow and it cuts off with the picture edge on the left.

    Anybody have a quick fix for this? Is it a problem with Safari’s CSS rendering? It still works in other Mac browsers (IE, NS). Should I submit a report to Apple?

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