On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 5:12 AM, Gunther Van Butsele <g...@velleman.be> wrote: > > A young webdesigner colleague of mine insists on using PNG's with alpha > transparancy in his designs, mostly because he uses a lot of gradients > and he wants them to flow seamlessly into the other backgrounds. > > What do you guys think? Use it or lose it?
You could use one of the many tricks to add PNG alpha transparency to Internet Explorer 6 (all other "modern" browsers support the format just fine), but depending on what you're trying to do with PNGs, it might not always "take," especially if you're doing anything like dynamically loading images via a slideshow or whatever. Or you could probably create an alternate GIF for IE6 with an approximate matte color, so it doesn't look too awful. My preferred option for PNG transparency, though, is to create PNG-8 with alpha transparency with Fireworks. The image fidelity isn't as great as PNG-24 (PNG-32 in Fireworks), but for most digital work the difference isn't too noticeable. Non-IE6 browsers treat semi-transparent pixels correctly, and IE6 treats them as fully transparent. With enough care in the design, it should work really well in all browsers. The greatest benefit from PNG-8 is the smaller file size, which can sometimes even be smaller than GIF. For more on this topic, see: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/09/18/png8-the-clear-winner/ But none of that really answers your question. I'd say aesthetically that over-reliance on gradients, drop-shadows, etc., can get tiresome, especially when there are a lot of them on a page. It'd be worth your colleague's time to expand his toolbox. Erik ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [cs...@lists.css-discuss.org] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
