[OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] ***SPAM*** Re: Report from the Evergreen DIG Styleguide team

[Nathan Eady]

web gurl <georgiawebgurl at gmail.com> writes:

> From my perspective -- image file formats IE6 is notorious for not
> rendering PNGs properly

At this point, even Microsoft doesn't really support IE6 any more.

Well, they SAY they do, but in practice the level of actual support
fell off to basically nothing sometime between three and five years
ago.  The last really significant update came out in 2004 with XP SP2.
In addition to not being significantly updated, IE6 is also not
available for operating systems released since that time, including
Vista, and recent web development efforts at Microsoft (since early
2007) have largely ignored IE6 as a possible user agent.

I suppose there's the Compatibility View mode in IE8, if you count
that as "support" for IE6.

> but IE7 seems to be addressing this issue

Seems to be addressing?  PNG works fine in all versions of IE7, to say
nothing of IE8 (which handles a number of other things better, too).
The only current browsers I know that *don't* support PNG are
text-mode browsers such as Lynx and elinks.

> There is a CSS +JQuery workaround for IE6 to force a pseudo
> transparency for IE6.  
  
Meh.

Several years ago (when it looked like further updates to IE would not
be forthcoming, before the start of work on IE7 was announced) I
experimented with that stuff and even thought about deploying it on a
website, and probably would have done if it had worked reliably, but
it only worked on about a third of all the IE6 installations I tried
it on, possibly because of something to do with security settings.  In
any case, it's clearly no longer worth the trouble at this point, IMO.
IE6 has been relegated quite firmly to legacy territory for a couple
of years, and if someone does insist on still using it, the problem it
has with PNG images is purely aesthetic; there are no actual usability
consequences (unless, I suppose, the foreground of your image matches
the shade of grey IE6 uses for PNG backgrounds, but that would be a
real corner case and can be more easily worked around in other ways).
Effort is better spent elsewhere, as far as I'm concerned.

-- 
Nathan Eady
Galion Public Library