I have been experimenting a lot with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) lately to see what can be done in designing a simple Web site. If you are using Apple’s Safari 1.1 or later, you are seeing things on this Web page that people using Camino, Firefox, Internet Explorer and most other browsers don’t: text shadows. Using shadows for story headlines is nothing knew; people have used Photoshop for years to make graphics with sophisticated layers and drop shadows, but the text shadows you see on this page are all done with CSS — not a graphic in there at all.
Safari supports new properties proposed for CSS level 3. In fact, Safari 1.1 has added support for three new properties: text-shadow property, rgba() colors with alpha values, and the :selection pseudo-element.
CSS has become much more prevalent in Web sites over the past couple of years — the recent redesign of Macworld and MacCentral makes extensive use of CSS. Using a style sheet you can easily change text size and many other elements of a Web site, including the ability to add drop shadows to any text on your Web site.
If you don’t use Safari, you can see what you are missing by checking out this image of the Web site.
