Set condition one throughout the fleet

[roadrunnertwice]

GODDAMMIT! Stupid fucking Internet Exploder! I finally booted up sedumphotos.net in there to take a look at it, and everything looks like total and complete ass! IT CAN'T UNDERSTAND PNG TRANSPARENCY! My logo and all my imageframes are totally shot! It's the newest frickin' version! What is wrong with you monkeys up in Redmond! ARG!

I feel like I'm in Neuromancer: It's like someone just inserted a chip containing a veteran web-designer's hate for IE directly into my brain.

Anyway, there's nothing for it; the only fix is going to be hardcoding the background color directly into the png files and saving new versions of them. We'll call that priority ten.

EDIT: Oh man, I had the coolest dream last night! It's not interesting to talk about, but it was nice. I just wanted you all to know. There was a pretty girl? Okay, bye.

Comments

[fozwalla.livejournal.com]

The upcoming IE7 is supposed to support PNG transparency/blending. So you can either change the PNGs now or leave them alone and wait a few months.

[fozwalla.livejournal.com]

... or just set the page background to white in IE (and only IE), using CSS. Unfortunately, I ... don't know how to go about doing that.

[roadrunnertwice]

Ugh, but it's going to take forever to get people to upgrade. Hell, people are still writing workarounds for IE 5.5. (Which I refuse to even check for, myself. >_<) Easier to just tell everyone to get Firefox already.

I don't know how to do per-browser CSS either, I'm afraid. And anyway, it could potentially make the problem a whole lot worse—right now, it's just a wart; bleaching the page might make it completely unusable. (The rest of my colors, you see.)

No, I think I'll have to just suck it up and change the PNGs. Eventually. >:)

[fozwalla.livejournal.com]

I tried to imagine the site with a white background and figured it might still look OK, but I guess I missed the white text. Maybe you could change that to something darker ... in IE only. ... Buh. It's clear that changing the PNGs is the easy way to go.

Huh. I just noticed that your gallery thumbnails and images are just JPGs with drop shadows applied, not PNGs. I'm trying to figure out how you pulled that off. I'm guessing you're building the drop shadows with little PNG images, since the drop shadows are screwed up in IE. But I can't find much about this in your source--at least, nothing I can understand easily.

Eh, never mind. I'm better off not asking, since it'd probably just go over my head. Nice job, though!

[roadrunnertwice]

I hope I wasn't giving the impression that I built the program—I've just been spending hours on hacking at it. ("It" being this open-source beast of a web app called "Gallery 2"—see gallery.menalto.com.)

The logo was all me; the drop-shadows are a plugin I got from somewhere, and yup, they're a collection of alpha-blended PNGs that get fitted around an image. The color scheme is also mine, as is the block of email/faq links in the sidebar (harder than you think! I had to edit like 5 files!) and some choice modifications to another misbehaving module or two.

It's definitely been a challenging project. I had to learn so many new languages just to find my ass on this thing...

Also, Livejournal is really misbehaving tonight.

[robertcalvin.livejournal.com]

One treasured rule of the world of web design:
Backwards-compatibility means you have to do everything ass-backwards. Tranparency, then, demands GIF and only GIF.

[roadrunnertwice]

I don't know that I'd go so far as to call it "treasured." But yes, you are absolutely and totally correct.

I guess what bugs me is that everyone else has had PNG absolutely NAILED since 2002, and this shouldn't be an issue. Internet Explorer, in all its available versions, is a stale piece of yesterday's tech.

At least I don't have to design for "web-safe" color—anyone operating at 256 or fewer colors has no use for high-rez plant-ID photos in the first place.