Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: TCL function for capturing browser type

4: Re: TCL function for capturing browser type (response to 1)

Posted by Mike Sisk on 02/01/06 11:21 PM

The only real problem with PNG and IE > 5.5 is alpha transparency. If substituting in a JPEG in place of a PNG will give the effect you want you probably don't need to worry about this (since JPEG doesn't support transparency).

If you do need support for transparency and need to avoid all the CSS/PNG land-mines in IE here's two links for possible solutions:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/index.htm
http://www.alistapart.com/stories/pngopacity/

All this hackery should soon be a thing of the past if Microsoft will ever release IE 7 (or everyone switches to Firefox).

As for support of IE version < 5.5 -- I don't think you need to worry about it. From looking at the web stats for the sites I run it appears that for the past year 95%+ of visitors using IE are at version 6. For the remaining 5% using ancient versions of IE, I suspect their browsing experience is so poor that the lack of proper PNG image support is the least of their problems.

-Mike

5: Re: Re: TCL function for capturing browser type (response to 4)

Posted by Pavel Boghita on 02/02/06 10:44 AM

that's exactly what I meant (working around the lack of transparency support in IE) The site I am building at the moment, is going to have something along the lines "optimised for Firefox". As for the IE users, I found that giving them the equivalent JPEG is good enough.
Thanks for the links. I've tried most of this stuff. JavaScript is not on the cards though. I managed to achieve some filtering with CSS/XHTML, but the best so far has been, Firefox sees the PNG, the IE sees the JPEG but also the PNG, so I got fedup and now I am working to figure out implementing the TCL solution as advised by Dave.

Thanks a lot for all the advice.