arkitrave :: log

Looking at these two pictures, you’d think the one on the bottom would be Mozilla, or another browser that supported .png transparency, and you’d assume the one on the top, with no transparency, was Internet Explorer, which, despite being reincarnated to version 6 years after .png became a standard image format, chose not to support it.

For the unitiated, a .png image allows you to set transparency of, say 75%, and shows, dimmed, what is underneath the image. .gif images and .jpg images do not allow this opacity change, seriously inhibiting what we can do with the web.

So, the University at Buffalo is using a proprietary Microsoft property to allow for transparency on their menus, while not allowing browsers such as Mozilla to see this transparency, despite the code and implementation being much easier.

See my recent submission to the CSS Zen Garden for another example of .png transparency in action (but it won’t work if you’re using Internet Explorer…)

I cite this as just one example among many that leads to a common perception among the public that Internet Explorer is a better browser, because “stuff looks better in Internet Explorer.” In reality, IE is broken, but designers, such as the well-meaning folks at UB, choose to design specifically for Internet Explorer and leave users of other (better) browsers out in the cold.