Friday, April 23, 2010

Transparent PNG files and Internet Explorer 6

If I blog about website issues on my website do I vanish into a black hole? I saw my (this) website on old IE6 today and it looked nasty. Now, let us look at the robot image on the home page. That image does in fact cover the whole page apart from the menu, header and footer, but it is a transparent PNG file. Therefore, the large area of white space you see is the layer underneath. When I saw the page on IE6, the background white was a dirty grey. It turns out that IE6 does not support transparent PNG files so it paints the transparent area with grey. After some research, I believe the best solution is to paint the transparent area with a transparent GIF on the fly. I wish I was smart enough to do that, but here is a link so someone who can and will allow you to download the solution.

http://www.devinrolsen.com/png-24-aplah-fix/

My transparent PNG backgrounds on all pages look great in IE6 now! Vy the way, this is not Microsoft fault, Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001 which predates transparent PNG files by 3 months!

Cheers! Mick.

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