You're reading a post titled “Gradients in CSS are now supported in WebKit” from the archives of Big Contrarian. It was originally published on April 14th, 2008 at 04:07 PM. If you enjoy it, you should subscribe to this site’s RSS feed, or its Twitter page.

Gradients in CSS are now supported in WebKit:

So what exactly is a gradient in CSS? It is an image, usable anywhere that image URLs were used before. That’s right… anywhere.

I’m not sure if this will save me work or cost me time yet. Since no other web browser supports gradients in this manner, you’d have to generate images for every browser other than WebKit to fallback on. But if you’re already doing that, why bother adding a gradient declaration in the first place (other than the obvious look-how-forward-thinking-i-am cred)? Since gradients are usable only in the places that images were previously useful, the new functionality doesn’t solve any layout issues either. It’s a neat trick, but it feels like a less useful trick than say, CSS drop shadow support.

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