No support for transparent PNG images?

A PNG image with alpha While being in Aalborg I’ve had the chance to see what GimpsterDotCom looks like in browsers other than Mozilla. In particular Internet Explorer… It turns out, that GimpsterDotCom looks somewhat funny in that browser because it doesn’t support transparent PNG images. I’m talking about the black edges around the rounded corners — Internet Explorer blends the images agains a black background when it should have used the red backgroundimage instead.

I’ve put an image that illustrate this on the right. If the browser supports PNG images with antialiasing, then you should see a blue square with a Greek alpha in it. The image is very blurred and this blur is transparent so that you can see the (white) background through.

This is ridiculous! All major browsers except Internet Explorer can handle alpha-blended PNG images — my father uses the Opera browser and it displays the pages without any problems. The PNG format is a well-established, open standard but Microsoft cannot be bothered to implement support for it, it seams… The strange thing is, that the version of Internet Explorer for Machintosh fully supports PNG images. It handles gamma correction and transparency beautifully. Perhaps the guys responsible for the Windows version of Internet Explorer should talks some more with the Machintosh division…

You can read more about the PNG image format at the PNG homepage and at W3C. –Martin Geisler

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