Birmingham Web Designer Jeremy Flint blogs here. He works for Kinetic Communications. He organizes events and programs for IPSA. He takes pictures and posts them on Flickr. He also blogs about Hiking and Mississippi State Sports when he has the time. He recommends Dreamhost for all your hosting needs. Make sure you grab the RSS Feed.

A member of the IE team made a post today on the IEBlog about the improved (or should I say new) support for per-pixel alpha in PNG images, also known as PNG Transparency. Apparently they are going to be supporting it fully in the IE7 Beta and future versions of the browser, which is great news for Web designers.

There have been several occasions recently when using the transparency in PNG would have been the perfect solution, only to have to use a less-than-stellar transparent GIF instead because of Internet Explorer.

They seem to have run the new support through several checks and tests which they listed on the IEBlog. Even the browser in my newsreader rendered the PNGs correctly.

With this announcement and the previous one about their deidcation to fixing problems with CSS, IE may finally join the ranks of other browsers that have been supporting it correctly for a while now.

The only question that remains is how long will it take before IE7 has enough market share to depend on it? Will it be available via WindowsUpdate? Will it work in early versions of Windows (at least 2000, maybe 98)? The beta is expected to be released sometime soon, and the final version I am guessing will be released next year with Longhorn (or possibly as a stand-alone upgrade, but I am not counting on that).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 26th, 2005 at April 26,2005 @ 3:35 pm and is filed under Browsers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.