[thelist] Support for PNG in IE 6

Liorean Liorean at user.bip.net
Wed Mar 6 12:40:05 CST 2002


At 12:15 2002-03-06 -0500, Michael Barrett wrote:
>Can anyone direct me to information regarding Internet Explorer 6 support
>PNG files?
>I've tried searching M$.com with no luck...
>The key question?
>Do like PNGs like work in IE 6 or what?

IE6 is able to display PNGs, can use full transparency in paletted mode,
but have twisted support for alpha transparencies and gamma correction.
True colour PNGs (16-48 bit) are given a standard background colour (grey,
white or black) on all areas with alpha transparency (full transparency is
given through alpha in true colour, so it's affected too). For paletted
PNGs (1-8 bit), both alpha and  full transparency is fully transparent.

IE6 can be tweaked to get near full support of PNGs though - they hid it
within the DirectX interface.
Using the proprietary css filters you can get alpha channels to work, but
only on images displayed as inserted content (img, input and object tags),
not on backgrounds.

See Aaron Boodman's excellent script Sleight at
<http://216.91.88.218/?request=/snippets/sleight.xml> to get a fast fix for
it. (I've found it sometimes doesn't work, though. You'll have to experiment.)

// Liorean




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