Interweb Exploder is Crap!

Just to warn you guys, don't use PNG files in webpages from now on...

I had the images for the menu on my website saved as PNG files. It matched with the page background colour perfectly in Opera and FireFox. However, when viewed in IE, the menu looked darker than the page!

It turns out (after lots of faffing about), that the new IE has some 'gamma correction' for PNG files that is supposed to make images blend with the page background better (apparently it is hard to get them the same colour!). Well I found it fuked it up instead. I could change the shade to try and make it appear correctly in IE, but it just applied even more gamma correction and F***ed it up again.

Solution was to re-save all PNG files as JPG and do a find and replace for PNG with JPG in my HTML files.

 

Dump Interweb Exploder and use Safari and a Mac.

Sorted.

Rob.

 

Exactly... but unfortunately most people still use IE so one must make their business webpage appear correctly on it.

 

I never use PNG files - gifs are suitable for menus, as jpgs are too lossy for that kind of work.

IE is the standard - like it or not.

As for Macs - don't go there (sound of can of worms being opened)

 

As they say on /.

"Nothing to see here. Please move along now..."

 

Which is fine if you don't need your image to blend with a plain background, but a complete PITA if you want to have your image anti-alias properly against something patterned or graduated.

My solution has traditionally been:

(A) Keep as much of your page layouts, etc., determined by the use of CSS, and
(B) At least one CSS for IE and a different one for decent browsers.

In the IE stylesheet, images are JPG and GIF only; in the Decent Browser CSS, you can also use PNG. Keep img src paths defined in the CSS rather than in the HTML/ASP/PHP/etc. as much as possible, so that the pages themselves don't mix presentation and content (a noble quest indeed!)

Do a Google on Eric Meyer - he is da man for CSS - and if you can, programmatically interrogate the HTTP header to establish the browser type and select a CSS automatically.

Works for me, though it's a bit of a nuisance to develop two CSS in parallel.

john

 

I try my best to use one CSS for all browsers but on my current project IE is being a pain.

It works on everything but IE, IE is the most popular browser

Microsoft just don't give a toss about web standards. Firefox is not perfect in this regard but at least it is capable of displaying web pages and decoding CSS properly.

With IE in some cases you have to break the rules just to get it to damn work.

 

See what the Acid Test 2 say about browsers IE or otherwise.

 

AT, the best approach with IE is to do as I describe - don't try to find one CSS file which will work with all - you'll spend forever tweaking it - just make one for IE and one for the standards-compliant browsers.

Agree with what you say about IE - it's a disaster in some regards. As part of a project I'm responsible for, I had to make a clone of part of an existing (large) intranet onto another server, and disable any hyperlinks which pointed to external or internal-but-not-cloned pages. I did this in a big complex perl script of which I am particularly pleased, but the actual disabling of links showed that IE doesn't even support the 'disabled' attribute for a hyperlink (a known bug at Redmond, unfixed for several years, suggesting to me that they just don't care) - so a bit of inline javascript:

Code:

onclick="return(false);"

...fixes that. Only to discover that right click enables the user to navigate to a page via 'open' and 'open in a new window'* - so it's not just bugged to high heaven, it's completely broken.

Just an example of one of the myriad problems with IE that make my job so... colourful...

John

* the solution is to switch off the right click using a handy bit of Javascript. Which is all horribly non-DDA compliant and prone to user turning JS off in the browser, which enables the links again. Argghhh!!! If only MS weren't so... SLOPPY!