Site Style Updates
I’ve updated the styling of Flexistentialist a bit, and I rather like the change. It may look the same to you at first glance, but try resizing the window. Instead of having the main area stay a fixed size, it is now fluid, changing with the size of your window! Thats a welcome change, I feel. Also, the logo image is now comprised of three layers. The background color, which is a dark blue, then a background image, set not to repeat, of clouds, and then a 24 bit PNG of ‘Flexistentialist.org’ with alpha-channel transparency (look at the pretty drop shadow). The words follow the right edge of your screen, and stay nice and pretty looking over the clouds.
If you aren’t seeing that, please let me know in the comments! In particular, the browser I’m concerned about is IE 5 for Windows. I’m using a small hack (I feel bad about using them, but the alpha channel PNGs are just so pretty, I had to give it a try..) to give IE 5 and up the PNG served up through one of Microsoft’s special filters that apply alpha channel transparency, because IE for windows itself does NOT support it. Despite the fact that the specification has been around for 7 years, IE/Win just can’t seem to get around to supporting it! However, using a DirectX filter, we can convince IE to render the alpha channel transparency.
Take a look at my source code if you are curious how it works. It uses a bit of Javascript to see if your browser is IE 5 or up for Windows. If it is, then it changes the properties of the image tag a bit to cause IE to use the AlphaImageLoader that it has to view alpha transparency of PNGs (why it doesn’t just support the alpha transparency like it should is something I don’t understand.
I’ll probably be making a few little tweaks here and there, but the design is stable for now. Once again, please leave any comments, particularly if you are using IE 5 for windows, as that is the one browser I haven’t had a good chance to test.
2 comments Tuesday 28 Jan 2003 | Sam | Metacrap
I was curious if you could spout some information about the qualities and detractors of Portable Network Graphics.
word,
Dustin
Commence the spouting.. Ok, as I see it, here are some nice pros and cons of PNG.
Pros:
Lossless compression. Assuming you don’t scale down the palette, you can have lossless compression, meaning, no artifacts! Your images stay crystal good.
Alpha channel transparency. Binary transparency is SO 1998. Alpha channel transparency lets each pixel take on an 8bit transparency value. Layer the PNGs to create wild effects, do simple things like antialiased edges on transparent images and drop shadows.
Great compression for graphics, that is, things that aren’t photos. A PNG can often have a smaller size than a corresponding GIF at the same bitrate, and look better too.
Its free as in freedom. No licensing issues like GIF (remember when they company that owned the GIF algorithm threatened to charge everyone licencing fees for using them? Well, they didn’t go that far, but they do charge image software people to include the GIF encoder into their software). PNG has no such licensing headache.
Cons:
Browser support isn’t great yet. Modern browers all support viewing PNGs, but alpha transparency is only sort-of supported in IE, very well in Mozilla, and patchy elsewhere. You are fine using solid PNGS, but transparent PNGs could use better support.
Filesizes for some image types can be greater than JPEG or GIF. For instance, the logo on this page is a bit larger than a corresponding GIF or JPEG, because it is a 32bit image, 24bits for color, and 8 bits for transparency. However, I feel that it still reasonably small in size, and acceptable for use on this page, since its not a very graphics intensive site to begin with.
There is probably more to both sides, but thats just what I pulled out of my noggin at 6am.
peace,
sam