If you run a blog or a web site you might have run into is the need to make sure images that are placed in the content areas of your web site (like a blog post entry), that you will have to modify the images to fit in with the rest of the design. This attention to detail is one area where I look to see if a web site design is really good.
To make the process easier, web designers can use CSS rules to apply padding and borders to create some effects to the images. But at the end of the day, you are still placing boxes around a box‑y images.
From Jon Aldinger, Mark Huot and Dan Mall, a new solution has come about: the swFIR. With some JavaScript, some minor changes to markup and a Flash file, you can add rounded corners and rotate images while leaving the image itself on its own.
Here’s a listing of the effects that can manipulated:
- border-radius
- border-width
- border-color
- shadow-offset
- shadow-angle
- shadow-alpha
- shadow-blur
- shadow-blur‑x
- shadow-blur‑y
- shadow-strength
- shadow-color
- shadow-quality
- shadow-inner
- shadow-knockout
- shadow-hide
- rotate
- overflow
- link
- elasticity
If you will, you could think of this as client-side digital imaging. Leave the user’s browser, browser’s JavaScript engine and Flash plug-in do most of the work, while you get back to work on your Web 2.0 IPO.