Age of PNG coming up?
Now that IE finally supports transparency in it’s 7th inception it’s time to look more into website design using transparency in PNGs.
32 Bit images (24 Bit color, 8 Bit transparency channel) allow effects previously hard or even impossible to do on websites. IE5.5 and IE6 in fact supported these transparencies to some degree with AlphaImageLoader. This was painful, had it’s issues when using this on PNGs that were background images of elements and simply didn’t work when ActiveX was deactivated. It also had issues when animating these PNGs for example in a draggable area although that worked ok in IE5.5+ most of the time.
The time for workarounds comes to a close, especially as soon as IE7 becomes the major IE in use out there. Currently it’s 20%+ for IE7 and about 50%+ for IE5.5/IE6. This still leaves a lot of room for improvement but it’s a start. I think IE7 will gain marketshare of about 50% by July 2007. Within a years time IE5.5 and IE6 will only be used by a minority. One issue with IE7 is that it is not and will not be available for Windows 2000. There are still a lot of Windows 2000 installations out there and some die hard resisters to switch to a newer Windows version (I am). But there also are still users out there using NS4 (yes, surprising). The only chance for those visitors i see is simply telling them to upgrade their browser or use an alternative browser that works fine. This may not be possible for every target group but for some websites this approach may work. Either way this will reduce users of your website. You can’t have it all i guess.
With proper use of transparency a lot of fancy designs can be achieved a lot easier than before. Just think of the dreaded drop shadow or even worse the drop shadow on the gradient. This will all work just fine with PNGs. I predict that we will see an uprise of transparent PNG using websites within the next 12 months. It will probably not reach mainstream websites until later but the geekier websites probably alread use it anyway.