[Web4lib] Png files and browsers?

[Thomas Dowling]

On 9/8/2006 4:56 PM, McHale, Nina wrote:

> Hi, all,
> 
> What's the status on browser compatibility for png files? I saw this
> page:
> 
> http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngapbr.html
> 
> ...and wondered how widely used they are now.
> 


I've been using PNG images in web pages for years - never any
complaints.  As Tyson Tate already posted, versions of IE prior to the
7.0 betas don't support transparency, but there's seldom any pressing
need for that--though it's really slick when it works.

Previous versions of IE were criticized for lack of gamma correction in
PNG images, and it looks like this is still a problem in IE7b2.  So PNG
is probably not your tool of choice if, say, you need it to exactly
match a background color set in a stylesheet.  As an example, view this
page in IE and in either Firefox or Opera:

  http://www.ohiolink.edu/~tdowling/png-test/

The PNG images have colors set in Photoshop to be the same as in the
stylsheet.  Only IE renders the PNG's shade of green as a different
color than the CSS background (at least, under Windows...in some
monitors...sometimes, etc.).

-- 
Thomas Dowling
tdowling at ohiolink.edu