I added a new Drop Shadow plugin to the site yesterday. It creates
soft drop shadows underneath nearly any element, like text headings,
content containers, and images (including transparent GIFs). It has
several options, and you can experiment with it on my demo page at
http://eyebulb.com/dropshadow.
Please note that the demo page has a ton of shadows applied, so it may
load a bit slowly. With more sparing use, it runs pretty quickly.
Also, this effect is not perfect. I have tried my best to make it work
fairly reliably in many situations, on most browsers, but you should
bear in mind that it is only a gimick. I have not magically enabled
browsers to natively render drop shadows.
For example, if you change your font size after loading the page, the
shadows will be off. Unfortunately, browsers do not expose a font
change event, and the only way to detect it would be to run a constant
poll (setInterval) on a text sample--something I do not wish to
impose. But, of course, anyone is welcome to add that, or any other
improvements, themselves.
I feel the plugin is still very useful in most applications. It was
really only intended for adding a little glam to a page, and if you
use it with care it does work reliably (e.g. for the font change
issue, you can use fixed styling for the few chunks of heading or
whatever that will be shadowed.).
This is my first project with jQuery, and many people here and on the
UI list were very helpful. Please let me know what you think, and a
big thanks to everyone.
Larry
