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Implementating Transparent PNGs in IE7

Posted by timothy on from the hammers-and-tongs dept.

Brandon writes "Over at the official IE Blog, Sam Fortiner has posted some very detailed information regarding Alpha PNG Rendering in IE7. From the article: 'As the dev who implemented the support, I can state that it was neither a bug-fix nor did it require a re-write of the display engine. Instead, it ended up being somewhere in-between the two and required what I would call "feature work." Implementing transparency support for PNG images required a significant amount of modification to the image decoding and display pipeline in IE along with a significant amount of new functionality added to the PNG decoder.'"

7 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. You are by leonbrooks · · Score: 4, Informative

    Konqueror displays partial images as they download. The original friggin' browser in OS/2 did the same thing. It's hardly new.

    Think about it: what's the whole purpose in Progressive-mode JPEGs?

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    Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
    1. Re:You are by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Settings > Configure Konqueror

      In the "Web Behavior" section, check the box for "Draw frame around not completely loaded images."

      (This works for Konqueror 3.4--not sure about earlier versions)

  2. Reading between the lines of the story... by leonbrooks · · Score: 3, Informative

    ...the code they're rewriting has not been substantially changed since the days when GIF was king of the images.

    AFAICT, what they've finally added is genuine translucency (not the simple yes/no transparency of yore) to MSIE's image handlng.

    Does anyone know of any other (non-text-mode) web browser which hasn't already been doing translucency for years?

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    Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
  3. Implementating? by eric.t.f.bat · · Score: 3, Informative

    Implementating? Implementating???!!!

    Something is very very wrong with the /. editors. I think it's time I spent my precious picoseconds looking at some other website.

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    I have discovered a truly remarkable .sig block which this margin is too small to conta
  4. Re:libpng.... by Chris_Jefferson · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you read the article, you'd find the main problem is that all their internal data structures and rendering system were only designed for boolean transparency.

    libpng wouldn't have helped with either of these, and this is where most of the work was.

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    Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
  5. You underestimate the power of PNG by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Besides the fact it generally offers better compression, now that we have FULL transparency in IE7, we can start doing some really great things with overlaying images in styles and such. Too bad it'll be like 2012 before IE6 disappears.

  6. Re:CSS support? by Nevyn · · Score: 2, Informative

    You need to specify "display: inline-table;" for the table element.

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    ustr: Managed string API with ave. 44% overhead over strdup(), for 0-20B