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Sunday, April 02, 2006

Internet Explorer PNG Transparency Hack

This is an interesting find.
http://solweb.no/?postid=39

This is a bug in Internet Explorer 6.0 and below. Internet Explorer 7.0 has confirmed this PNG transparency bug is addressed.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/04/26/412263.aspx

All along, I thought it may not be possible for this particular image. PNG supports 256 levels of transparency where GIF only supports one. Turning a PNG with an alpha channel that doesnt reach %100 transparency into a gif would look just like the PNG without the alpha channel. And turning a PNG with an alpha channel that does reach %100 transparency into a gif would result in a halo around the image. Not only that but PNG supports thousands of colors where gif only supports 256. My recommendation to fellow EE experts thus is always "Convert to GIF".

Still, GIF and JPG are still the 2 picture formats being supported by all browsers. If you don't see the transparency (without applying the hack), this means the browser you are using doesn't support PNG files with alpha channels. IE for windows doesn't, IE for Mac does, iCab for Mac does, Netscape 6 does, Mozilla does, and Firefox does.

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