Comment by Jason Knight on "Changing box-shadow color in CSS?"

Don't take this the wrong way, but if a half dozen to dozen extra characters and ^C^V is too hard, maybe you shouldn't be writing HTML/CSS... Hell I'm not sure it would even be less characters.... take @Kleo's example removing the selectors so we can see the number of characters as a line.

box-shadow:1px 1px 25px; color:#000; color:#F00;
box-shadow:1px 1px 25px #000; box-shadow:1px 1px 24px #F00;

REALLY? That's "so hard" you need a separate property? Of course if it WERE a separate property, guess what?!?

box-shadow:1px 1px 25px #000; box-shadow:1px 1px 24px #F00;
box-shadow:1px 1px 25px #000; box-shadow-color: #F00;

Again, if a half dozen characters at best. ^C^V is your friend! It's so close as to make no-never-mind!

Admittedly, I say the same thing about that preprocessor SCSS asshat nonsense; usually it means someone is being too lazy to type, or simply failing to grasp how to use selectors properly in the first place.

Your post is a bit more aggressive than it needs to be and fails to see other use-cases where defining just the colour is desirable. Hint: it has nothing to being lazy.

For example, a website built on a template might have separate CSS files for the "master" layout styles vs. the "user" colour styles. The master file has all the base rules defined (border width, style, etc.) and is controlled by the developer while actual colours are in separate sheets and controlled by the designer(s). If a fix or change needs to be made to the layout, the developer can change it in one place without needing any of the designers to update their code. This is possible with border, background, and any other property that allows targeted rules but not box-shadow or text-shadow, which is unfortunate. This might not seem like a pain for one website, but when you have 30 different websites using the same master sheet it can become a nightmare to go through and manually update each of them.

Again, this has nothing to do with being lazy and everything to do with scope, efficiency, access rights, and possibly more I'm not thinking of.

" For example, a website built on a template might have separate CSS files for the "master" layout styles vs. the "user" colour styles. "

In other words, increasing the number of handshakes and pissing on performance. .. and really for your whole post if you have SO MUCH CSS that making such minor changes is an issue, then you have TOO BLOODY MUCH CSS.

If I'm aggressive about that, it's because I'm SICK of being called in to FIX train wrecks of ineptitude where people waste dozens if not hundreds of K of Markup and megabytes of CSS on doing 48 to 72k of code COMBINED to do the damned job! In the process typically pissing all over speed, accessibility, and usability!

MAYBE if people weren't crapping out a megabyte or more of CSS spanning a dozen or more separate files (without even having media attributes on their <link>) in complete ignorance and ineptitude when in most cases they're doing 24k of CSS' job, MAYBE they wouldn't be diving for idiotic asshat solutions like frameworks, preprocessors, and all the other ignorant incompetent BULL that's become the norm in development right now!

I walk into most existing projects right now, and I have to choke back an overwhelming disgust to the point of nausea... and what you described there Adrian is EXACTLY the type of incompetent ignorant garbage bringing my temper to a boil!

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