I remember going through the CSS2 specification a couple of years back. Liked what I saw, there were a lot of elements there that I felt were missing in CSS1. All in all looked good, a worthy addition.

Then I went and tried it on web browsers. Not much of it worked. Slightly dismayed, decided to forget the CSS2 spec for some time. The browsers needed to catch up.

So last couple of weeks I've been forced to go through the paces with CSS1 again (the website you're staring at). Things seem to work reasonably well. However, some things still feel clumsy when restricted to CSS1 alone (like the lack of min-max widths). So I decided to take a peek at that CSS2 thing again. Well defined, complete, a nicely written specification from W3C.

Then picked up one random CSS2 element and tried it. Of course it happened to be the ill-fated (more on that in a bit) text-shadow property. And of course it did not work on either IE7 or Firefox.

After cursing a while about the lack of CSS2 support, I decided to investigate a bit more. I wasn't surprised IE7 wasn't supporting this property but was surprised Firefox ignored it as well. Despite few bugs here and there, Firefox in general attempts to make some effort to be specification compliant.

So it turns out that the Revision 1 of CSS 2 (a.k.a CSS2.1) dropped the text-shadow property completely due to lack of browser support. Bummer. However, it looks like text shadow is now making a comeback with CSS3! Found some information and samples on how Firefox is implementing it, along with some interesting info about other shadow effect extensions (the shadow-box looks much more interesting than shadow-text, in my opinion).

Of course very soon the realization hit that it will take another couple of years for all major browsers to get to CSS3 level. But I am ever the optimist!