[Plugin] PNG-Alpha Transparency for MSIE

Quote from: bugsmi0 at Jul 06, 2006, 05:29 PM

yep but that’s alright, i’m not going to need it since i’ve joined the ranks of firefox promoters and IE will no longer be a concern, i’ll be recommending people use firefox instead of IE, the more people stop using IE the sooner IE will get put in the graveyard along with the rest of the junk browsers.

Run Firefox Run...

That is a very noble cause, but alas, a daunting, insurmountable task. I remember being a young, ambitious web designer, kicking out loads of amazing designs, then finding out they look like complete shit on IE! And also feeling the same way you do. I remember thinking "F*** IE, I will just put up a link to download FF, and a disclaimer saying this site is not compatible with IE". I design on Mac OS X, so I had no easy way to check IE. The fact of the matter is that IE is too popular and too widespread to simply disregard it. Estimates say that anywhere from 74% - 94% of internet surfers primarily use IE (depending on which statistics you look at). No matter what math you use, that is still the majority of your traffic, and to disregard that and say "just go get firefox or it won’t work" is going to put your average visitor time at less than three seconds, or however long it takes them to read your warning. At this point, and unfortunatley probably for many moons to come, IE is still the most popular browser (even though it sucks the most and is a complete POS) and you MUST design for IE if you want your surfers to spend more than 3 seconds at your site.

PM me about other workarounds for PNG trancparency. I spent so much time trying to get alpha transparent PNGs to work, that I found several other solutions along the way. Mostly Jpegs that give an illusion, and some imaginative CSS. Not as easy, but they work. I would be happy to try to help you figure out something that will work for your design.

-sD-

Scotty is right: IE is the dominant browser and not designing for it is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

I’ve used transparent PNGs in IE for a long time now, so it’s just a matter of coding for it. I use PHP-scripted CSS files for transparent PNG background images and the JavaScript method I posted above for ones that appear in the page itself. It’s no harder to make this work than any other cross-browser annoyance.

BTW, if you use an XHTML doctype you can force IE6+ into standards mode, and that makes most of its non-compliant behavior go away...

yea I can appreciate your thoughts on IE and it being the most popular but we have to start somewhere, if more people say no to IE people will turn to firefox why give them an option not to ?

There are many sites that boldy say sorry we do not support your browser, bank sites do it too, I don’t believe it will effect traffic much, if people are interested in your site they will make the switch.

I have no problem saying no to IE NO!!!

All an IE user has to do is download Firefox how hard is that, you provide the link they download it and use it and enjoy viewing your site as it was intended, they are visiting your site because of you not just becasue of the browser they are using, they will make the switch if we ask them to.

Sure most people are using IE but then most people were using 800x600 now I think its 1024x768 things change and so must IE users, they need a better browser and its our duty to force them to not have any other option he he.

Evolution requires force, anything that has evolved was force to adapt and change this is a good thing otherwise we’d still be using IE.

I think we’ll also be seeing more people switch to Mac Intel too, Run Mac Run

I think I want some of whatever you’re smoking...

I like your attitude, but it’s just not realistic to expect people to download and install another browser just to view your site. If your site is purely personal, then maybe it doesn’t matter if people click away when they see a warning (and maybe a broken layout). But if you’re doing commercial or non-profit web design, you don’t really have the luxury of telling people what browser to use to see it.

I currently have Opera, Firefox, and IE6 and 7 installed on my machine, and I use IE6 almost 100% of the time because as a designer I need to see the web as most everyone else does. I would not even launch another browser just because some site told me to. I feel like it’s the designers’ job to make their content accessible, and I shouldn’t have to do anything special to view it.

Zap, I agree with everything in the above post. Everything you wrote is unfortunate, but very, very true.

Bugsmi0, I wish you luck in your hostile takeover of IE. You are definitely not the first, and you won’t be the last. The fact of the matter is that website visitors don’t feel the frustrations of IE that designers feel. Ugghh! not a day goes by that I don’t curse IE. For the majority of internet users, IE is absolutely fine, and if a website doesn’t display right with their browser of choice, they will simply leave. Even worse, if they see a message that says they need to download new software to view your site, they will probably not return. It is sad. It is terrible, but the world just isn’t ready to get rid of IE, and most people don’t upgrade to a better browser unless it is part of microsoft update. The planet isn’t ready for a war on IE. Luckily, IE 7 looks...err.... dare I say it.... pretty good (from a designers standpoint anyway).

There are many sites that boldy say sorry we do not support your browser, bank sites do it too, I don’t believe it will effect traffic much, if people are interested in your site they will make the switch.

Those bank sites usually deny you if you try to use anything but IE (probably for Actve X and such). If you have an example link of a high traffic site that provides customer services (like a bank) that refuses to serve pages to IE, I would be amazed.

Evolution requires force, anything that has evolved was force to adapt and change

Evolution requires time, chance, and patience. Check out a book by Chuck Darwin called "The Origin of Species" if you are more interested in what evolution actually means.

Kind regards,

-sD-

Evolution requires time, chance, and patience

tell that to the poor creature who had no time, no chance and zero patience and was forced to grow wings or die all in a matter of minutes he he

it’s all good, i still think as a designer you have an obligation to provide your clients with better tools and sound advice, I have people tell me all the time what to use what not to use and I obey becuase they know what they are talking about, it doesn’t hurt one bit to download firefox. Designers should not be afraid, i would not hire a web designer if they were too timid to give me direction on what software to use, etc. Already more people everyday are downloading firefox it can’t be stopped, its only a matter of time when IE gets laid to rest, this I have no doubt.

In the mean time, maybe for IE users i’ll just create a single page with text no template just raw text text he he
throw in an ugly IE button link that reads IE users click here

Quote from: bugsmi0 at Jul 07, 2006, 09:30 AM

it’s all good, i still think as a designer you have an obligation to provide your clients with better tools and sound advice.

I can agree with you here. People hate being told what to do, but they like to have options! If you can provide them with a better option, they may be grateful to you. But, at the same time, it may still be important to not discriminate against those who are unable or unwilling to move away from IE. Even mozilla.com renders the same in IE. If universal compatability is important enough for the gods at mozilla, it is important to me as well LOL.

Good luck with your design,

-sD-

If you use standards-compliant design with an XHTML DOCTYPE, it’s actually pretty easy to make pages look the same on IE6 and Firefox. You may need a hacked or PHP-scripted stylesheet for some layouts, embedded content needs code for both browsers, and PNGs with transparency won’t work in IE6 without an extra step, but that’s really not such a big deal imho.

My point being simply that we’ve come a very long way since we needed to design for Netscape 4 and IE 5 and - omigawd do y’all remember this? - AOL!

If I were going to make any predictions for the next year (not based on what I want to happen, but rather what seems most likely), I’d say that IE7 becomes the dominant browser and one or more major security issues are found in Firefox which keep it from growing past the 10-15% mark.

one cool thing about this plugin is that it creates the spacers so I don’t have to so If I want to call an image via css with a hover effect all I need to do is <div id=select ><a href=""></a></div>
works out nicely,

re: IE you are right there are ways to make IE behave there are many IE hacks knowing a cure for a specific thing is the challenge. The interesting thing in my situation is the design came out 90% in IE with no hacks at all think it was a matter of photoshop slicing and dicing end up mostly ok. It was the dreaded horizontal whitespace which I believe is associated with the UL LI I tried all the hacks people recommend but none seem to work I could just leave it with the white space once you scroll up and down it removes then comes back once you hover over the li menus

I’ll try to be more kinder to IE users [* SMACK *] opps he he I think as IE continues to evolve it does seem to get better towards CSS standards so just think it can only get better from here on yippee

IE7 is closer to release, and has actually improved quite a bit sine the beta 2 release:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192300313