Dungeon Master Forum

I have used an internet trick to get a gradient onto a background image with low bandwidth cost.

please take a look at the following link and let me know if you can see the gradient or not by voting in the above poll.

Thanks

http://www.dungeon-master.com/temp_html/Grad.htm

Sorry wasn't looking properly, ignore my vote, after examining the source I see the nice "alpha" gradient from full at the top decreasing.

This will only work in Internet Explorer on Windows. Avoid if possible.

Agreed, can see it fine on ie6, not on mozilla 7

This is like the css gradient thing that works in ie6 only...are they based on the same code or something?

Yeah, all that stuff (Filters and using Direct X to render PNG transparency) is proprietary to IE only. You have to jump through hoops to get PNG alphas to work in IE, while every other browser on the planet supports it natively. Microsoft really are a bunch of idiots sometimes, and this is a prime example.

It's because of this abysmal support in IE that PNG with alphas has never really taken off (plus the fact that they are large files!). IE is used by something like 95% of the world's surfers, so unless Microsoft ever add the support to IE natively, it'll never get widespread use. And they probably never will as their development on IE has stopped. All their future browsers will be different and built directly into windows. You won't even have a browser as such....

Bleaargh..

IE6 also doesn't support progressing JPEGs. I stupidly saved a load of digital photos as progressive JPEGs, only to discover that instead of loading in the nice gradual way, the screen is completely blank until the whole image has downloaded - i.e. worse than a bog-standard JPEG.

It also doesn't support the W3C Level 2 DOM so we'll never be rid of 'if (document.all)' and other annoying tests. At least you *can* force it to use official CSS2 via a strict or semi-strict DTD. This also works in the newer Mozilla-based browsers (they go into 'quirks' mode if you don't put a named DTD in the DOCTYPE).

Apart from a few grumbles, IE6 is mostly OK though. It will be interesting to see if the non-appearance of IE7 gives the 'competition' a chance to get ahead and win some converts.

yeah I can get PNG to work for anything except ie5 and lower, I just wanted to see if other common browsers supported this gradient.

This could just as easily be done as a flash element and work in any browser too. I'm looking at low cost (for both processor time and size) options for srucing up that main page we have..

moo

Oh and IE does natively support the png alphas.. however it requires unique calls to make it work. like this gradient.. it's within the code along with support for dropshadows, motion blur, emboss, and othe rinteresting transitions and filters..

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/defau ... loader.asp

there it is.. alpha loder.. I also have some code for displaying png's in other borwsers and some picking code that makes it choose the method of display based on the browser.. etc etc.. gotta figure out how it all works though..

Yeah, the point is though that one shouldn't have to do all this DirectX bollocks to make this work in IE. That's why it doesn't support it 'natively'.

<rant>

All other browsers* support PNG alphas 'natively' -- you just dump a PNG in your page and if it has an alpha channel, they render it correctly. Microsoft are being cheap lazy assed dicks by forcing developers to shell out to Direct X commands (because that's what all the filter stuff really is at the base level).

It's possible to get PNG alphas to work using (again) IE 'behaviours' so that they degrade properly in other browsers. But the point is that all this stuff IS NON-STANDARD and goes against the W3C specifications. It also makes it impossible to code a 'one size fits all' web page, something that in this day and age just simply isn't viable. Good developers dropped the browser-sniffing, custom page serving rubbish several years ago -- we shouldn't have to go back to those dark days if we simply want a bit of alpha transparency here and there.

</rant>

*Well, all good modern ones anyway: Netscape 6+, Mozilla, Firebird, Safari, Opera

well to be quite honest IE represents justover 85% of our users.. then there are little snifflets of other things here and there. Thats pretty much true of most people because like me.. they are too lazy to test other ones to see something that works better and many people are simply afraid of it and since IE comes with windows.. that's the way they go. I went through the porcess of trying other browsers and found most to be wanting.. they often either had ads in them or wouldn't show many of the websites I looked at properly or the interface itself took up so much of the screen I barely had any surfing room.etc etc etc..

we even installed and set up mozilla at the college.. it was there.. set up and ready to go. The students HUNTED for IE and used that instead.. not a single one of them continued using it.. 44 students.. so we didn't bother this year.

MS knows they are pretty much standard for most people and as such they tend to do what they want.. no one says it's right.. but when you take such a larger percentage of the overall market.. What kind of motivation to behave do you really have?

I have i.e., and can't se anything...

Frankly, I'm not sure. I do my best to ignore most of microsoft's stuff.

ie6?

I no longer see the effect because I switched to Mozilla FireFox.