According to the last modification date of the file, I created this jquery plugin back in march 2011. As far as I remember, I was exploring 2 things at the same time :
- what fancy things can you do with the (at that time fairly) new text-shadow css property ?
- how do you write your own jquery plugin ?
So I very naturally combined both things into one, creating this elemental plugin. I don’t see any real use cases except if you want to create a web page that looks like it was made in the 90’s.
On the css part, it’s quite simple. I just stack a couple of text shadows on top of each other; the change in size and color gives the impression of a gradient.
On the JS side, it’s worth noting that it’s really easy to create a jQuery plugin. You need to make sure your plugin stuff doesn’t leak into the global space, but apart from that, it’s just good old javascript. If you want to take a look at it, I used it as my hello world repo on GitHub.