http://www.alistapart.com/articles/mountaintop/

Kind of cool.  I’m still try­ing to think of a valid appli­ca­tion for it, but it’s unde­ni­ably cool.  I can’t see how it would work with any kind of dynamic con­tent, and that’s the only place it would be jus­ti­fi­able — if there is sta­tic con­tent, use sta­tic images which fit with your design, save your mas­ters with lay­ers, and all is good sans spe­cial CSS code (which, might I add, is actu­ally more time con­sum­ing than man­u­ally edit­ing four images if you’re using lay­ers appro­pri­ately) and browser quirks when it comes to stan­dards com­pli­ance (although I believe that this par­tic­u­lar thing should work on pretty much any­thing under the sun with­out any sig­nif­i­cant prob­lems… please, feel free to prove me wrong).

If it IS dynamic, and you’re using a sitewide CSS def­i­n­i­tion, then, well, you’re screwed if you ever want to use it for any­thing else than the pur­pose for which it was orig­i­nally defined (i.e. a the­matic kind of graphic, such as that  — reveal­ing an appli­ca­tion for the poten­tial inclu­sion of page-specific CSS code (worth look­ing at, I shall exam­ine that one more closely later, if I remem­ber to), but doing lit­tle else.

I won­der if it’d be pos­si­ble to use that for really cool graphs with PHP… think­ing of course of using GD and var­i­ous things to plot points… I can’t for the life of me remem­ber if it does GIF out­put (the only reli­able cross-browser image for­mat with trans­parency — PNG is tech­ni­cally supe­rior, of course, but a cer­tain browser… has issues ren­der­ing trans­parency with it cor­rectly) with trans­parency.  It han­dles trans­parency inter­nally (i.e. in pro­cess­ing stages) well enough, though, so graphs could always be over­laid on fancy back­ground images (much the same way as my dynamic news titles sim­ply con­sist of text with trans­parency over­laid upon a sta­tic back­ground image).  And that, of course, nul­li­fies the valid­ity of using CSS for spe­cial backgrounds.

This has some inter­est­ing appli­ca­tions, espe­cially in the field of traf­fic report­ing, mar­ket­ing and the like — the dif­fer­ence between using a sim­ple, default, black on white Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion and a styled, themed, coloured one is, of course, the inter­est it attracts.  Now, graphs can get pretty bor­ing.  And edit­ing graphs to put into a doc­u­ment of any kind (I only say Pow­er­Point because that is some­thing that is on my mind at the minute) can be some­what tedious — unless, of course, the graphs come pre-generated and styled appro­pri­ately for use with pre­de­fined doc­u­ment styles.  Which this allows to happen.

Even if it were some­thing as sim­ple as a cor­po­rate water­mark (i.e. if a web devel­oper was to report on the suc­cess of a web­site or other elec­tronic pro­mo­tional ven­ture) for use in reports — GD is well equipped to han­dle this.  Coloured back­grounds, and even images as back­grounds, don’t require any sig­nif­i­cant com­pli­ca­tion of the process.Reports that clients can access with­out any inter­ven­tion required, gen­er­ated on the fly (no month-old data here — site hits and ses­sion lengths and mem­ber­ship appli­ca­tions and what­ever else is required may be stored in a data­base — this is a con­cept I had work­ing over 12 months ago, but haven’t done any­thing with yet), com­plete with brand­ing and in accor­dance with what­ever doc­u­ment styles either the client or the devel­op­ment house dictates.

Sound cool?  Yeah, only to the web devel­oper geeks out there, and those in mar­ket­ing.  I’m a fair way from the sub­ject of CSS right now, aren’t I?  Just goes to show, there is more than one way to solve a prob­lem… my server-side bias has led me be inclined towards this solution.