Original Personas vs. Enhanced Personas
Overview
A Persona contains two images – a header and a footer. These images are very large – 3000 pixels wide. You may wonder why that is. Personas is designed to do one thing; take an image and put it in the upper right corner of the browser. It doesn’t resize or scale the image. If you resize your browser very wide, you just see more of the image on the left hand side. That 3000 pixels number is a completely arbitrary number that is designed to be the maximum you will resize your browser.
This architecture creates problems.
- The file sizes of the images can be very large.
- If you have a repetitive image, you have to cut and paste it to make it 3000 pixels wide.
- If you want to use an existing image, you’ll have to do something to convert it to 3000 pixels wide.
- You can’t guarantee that anything appears in the upper left corner.
- You can’t have more than one background image.
All of these problems have already been solved by CSS, but none of the CSS to do anything to background images is available in Personas. That’s where the Enhanced Personas feature of Personas Interactive comes in.
Enhanced Persona Attributes
... or skip right to the Enhanced Personas Development Specifications to get started.
backgroundImage
Specifies the URL of an image or multiple images that will be used for the background. Multiple images are separated by a comma. The images are drawn from right to left, so the left most image appears on top. We aren’t using the actual CSS syntax here, so don’t put url('...') around the images.
backgroundPosition
Specifies the position of the images in backgroundImage using standard CSS rules. These rules are separated by a comma.
backgroundSize
Specifies the size of the images in backgroundImage using standard CSS rules. These rules are separated by a comma.
backgroundRepeat
Specifies the repetition of the images in backgroundImage using standard CSS rules. These rules are separated by a comma.
backgroundColor
Whereas accentcolor in the original Personas specification is used for both the titlebar and the background of the browser, we allow you to specify just the background color. It is never used for the titlebar. If you specify both a backgroundColor and an accentcolor, accentcolor is used for the titlebar, and backgroundColor is used for the background of the browser.
textShadow
One of the other areas that causes problems with Personas is the area of text shadows. We’ve provided an additional attribute to let you control the text shadow. Personas determines the color of the text shadow to use for your Persona by computing the luminance of the textcolor specified in your Persona.
let luminance = 0.2126 * r + 0.7152 * g + 0.0722 * b;
If the luminance is less than or equal to 110, it makes your text shadow light, otherwise it makes your text shadow dark. We’ve made textShadow an attribute that you can specify, and you can give it three values: dark, bright, or none. You can experiment with these three values to see which one makes your text look good on your Persona.