Jody Mickey

Let me put this out there at the very start:  I am not a graphic designer.  I wish I had the eye for it, but I don’t.  I don’t really know the difference between the colors mustard and custard, but I can tell the difference between two distinct shades of gray.  So can Firefox, and Safari, and Opera isn’t bad at it either, but Internet Explorer is having some issues.

I’ve got a page with a gray background, with the content centered.  There is a small drop shadow effect around the content, which has a white background.  Of course the way to achieve this is to fade from the drop shadow to the background color with an image, and then use a background color for the rest of the sides of the page.  At first I thought that things were messing up because I was using an unsafe web color for the background, but it turns out that IE is just rendering the image wrong.

I came across this fairly old blog post about PNG color oddities which noted the same thing, but this was for IE6 and 7 beta.  Thankfully they finally decided to support transparent PNG’s, but it seems that they’ve still got some work to do.  The blog I linked to above was using 8-bit PNG’s, while I was using 24-bit.  My solution is to just use JPEG, which works great, but that is not a fix, it’s a cover up.  All I want to do is use PNG’s!  Make it work, IE team!