So for a couple of years now, folks have been trying to find ways to work around the fact that the box-shadow property from CSS3 seems to perpetually be just a few months away from actually appearing in Web browsers everywhere. Box shadows are a very common design element, and not being able to use them on the Web is a real pain in the ass. You may have noticed that all block-style elements on this site include a very subtle shadow behind them. You can check out this post to see an example of what I’m talking about, and also to look at a picture of a really pretty girl. Two birds with one stone, I say. I’ve been adding shadows to my art with the aid of a little Photoshop automation. When I’ve got a piece of art cropped and color-corrected the way I want it, I run a Photoshop action that adds a five-pixel border around the art, throws a very subtle shadow behind it, and comps the whole thing on top of my background color. It’s easy and fast.

After researching every single modal window, lightbox, slimbox, etc out there nothing fit the bill. Granted some of them were very nice but only fit a specific purpose, others were a nightmare on the code end, and others were just hacks of another. None of them truly supported all of the features we needed and those that were close could not be easily adapted without a bottle of Prozac near by. Other caveats were the complete lack of ability to style and position the system, and the insane over-kill of some of the systems trying to reproduce either another desktop (As if most computer users aren't confused enough) or the reproduction of a popup window (Show me someone who likes popup windows...). Lastly, most people didn't actually test for their media types and how they behaved in other browsers and operating systems (Yes the movies and Flash work in Firefox for the Mac). Backwards Compatibility: Tested in Windows Firefox/IE6/IE7/Safari3/Opera & Mac Firefox/Safari/Opera/Netscape (Keep in mind my theme that I have provided can be changed and the advanced level of the theme has an effect on browser compatibility).