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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. Monopoly by augustz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is a really interesting case study in monopoly behavior and the value of competition. Microsoft you will remember pretty much stopped IE development and shut down the IE team.

    Firefox came along, and whamo, all of a sudden Microsoft has developers writing things like. Very impressive. What's interesting for me is they are huge huge company by comparision to Firefox, but it took firefox to really get them to start making some improvements.

  2. CSS support? by tryone · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Very nice. Now go fix the crappy CSS support.

    1. Re:CSS support? by Enrico+Pulatzo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Are you trying to break CSS with your markup there, or do you have a legitimate reason for making a table display inline? When you make an element inline and force it to contain non-inline children this kind of thing happens. It'd be the same as wrapping a table with a span and complaining that the span isn't being applied correctly.

  3. Re:libpng.... by Quarters · · Score: 2, Insightful
    When Microsoft puts BSD licensed TCP/IP code in an OS people use it as a cheap opportunity to sound psuedo-intellectual by bringing it up in vague "Microsoft is bad because they didn't write their own" terms whenever possible.

    Now those same people want to say "Microsoft is bad because they didn't use BSD licensed PNG code."

    The hypocrisy is staggering.

  4. Png, schming by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Now that the LZW patent has exprired, whoop-de-doo. Where were they when we really needed good png support?

    What we need now is something that isn't a petri dish full of a rich agar browth waiting for every sort of web infection to take root and mulitply to the destruction of your computer, and something that adheres to CSS2 standards. But we already know that these needs aren't going to be met, so all I can draw as a conclusion is IE7? Bugger off. Waste of Time. Non-starter. Count on using Firefox for the foreseeable future.

  5. Re:libpng.... by eraserewind · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Um, it's only hypocracy if the same person says it.

  6. Re:Reading between the lines of the story... by jericho4.0 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    "Obviously, if it wasn't a 'deep' problem, tney would have supported transparent PNGs years ago."

    The PNG support seems to have been done by one guy, in a few months. Not exactly a 'deep' problem for a company with Microsofts resources.

    I think the reason they didn't support it years ago is because they simply don't care.

    --
    "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis