I believe the time of the PNG has finally come to the IE user base. We recently checked our site usage statistics, and found that a little over 75% of users now view the internet through IE7. The reason these two facts are connected, as you may already know, is that IE6 ignored the PNG’s transparency. The only workaround offered was impractical, required JavaScript to be enabled, IE-specific conditional CSS, and the use of Microsoft’s filter library in order to make IE behave properly. Thankfully, that is all behind us now. I have also made it all official (at least to myself) by using my first PNGs’ in one of our new client sites.

The reason this issue is one of those in contention within the greater scope of the great internet browser debacle is the fact that IE, being the most popular browser by far, was the last browser to adopt the PNG standard. The geeks knew that this was unacceptable, and the general user demographic simply shrugged and continued to wonder why certain funky websites didn’t quite look right. I have no reason to offer for this apparent blunder, but someone at Microsoft might know.

This is just a sign that Microsoft has spent the last few years attempting to re-envigorate their look and get themselves into the 21^st century market. Just excuse them the error of Vista, and you might just finally have an operating system that makes sense (but this is being optimistic). I am not going to bash any one developer, as that has never gotten anyone anywhere. Also, there is enough bashing in progress across the myriad websites devoted to the subject that I don’t need to add my 2 cents to it. To indicate my solidarity, the only browser I’ve used consistently is IE.

I’m the web developer at Creative Unity, and have been for little over a year now. In that short space of time, I’ve learned more about website creation and maintenance than I have during the previous  4 years of college I subjected myself to (imagine that). It makes me fairly new to the workforce, and a budding guru in the field of web development (yes, I still have a lot to learn).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.