There’s an awful lot of noise at the moment regarding dropping IE6 and forging ahead with CSS3 properties for the finer touches on web layouts. Do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser?
One such example is adding drop shadows to content blocks. There are countless ways of achieving this, most requiring additional HTML markup and one or more PNG images. Not to mention hacks for IE6 to get render PNGs properly. All of this begins to degrade page performance, when really the drop shadow is merely a secondary design flourish. CSS3 provides the box-shadow property to achieve just that. Thankfully Safari/Webkit has supported this for some time, and Firefox more recently with Firefox 3.5. Internet Explorer provides a DropShadow filter but this provides a hard-edged shadow unlike its CSS3 counterpart. By combining the Glow and Shadow filters however, we can achieve something that fairly closely resembles the rendered CSS3 shadow…