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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.'"

6 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. libpng.... by __david__ · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So this implies they wrote their own PNG reading routines instead of using libpng?

    Is this some sort of NIH thing?

    libpng has a BSDish licence if I recall... So that can't be the issue...

    -David

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    There. Now go play some cool javascript games!
    1. 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.

      --
      Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
  2. 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.

  3. 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
  4. Re:Requires IE5, IE6 by FidelCatsro · · Score: 4, Funny

    to me "Best viewed in Microsoft Internet Explorer" say "Wanted , new web designer/Developer"

    --
    The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
  5. CSS support? by tryone · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Very nice. Now go fix the crappy CSS support.