Transparent PNGs in IE [was Re: Lost Wages (round 2)]

Mike Hearn m.hearn at signal.qinetiq.com
Wed Nov 6 04:41:12 CST 2002


If you look at these files:

http://theoretic.com/template.css

and

http://theoretic.com/pngbehavior.htc

you can see how to get PNG transparency in IE. Essentially it involves
uploading the .htc file and referencing it via CSS. Ugly, but it works.

The reason this is needed is because some time ago now (i think in ie5
or ie5.5) MS integrated *cough* IE with the DirectX imaging model,
DirectShow in particular I think. This allows things like page
transitions and quite advanced imaging/filtering within web pages. I've
never actually seen this functionality used out on the web for anything
other than working around their broken transparency support however.

The COM object it uses is referred to as
"DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader". Interestingly, when
running IE6 under Wine this doesn't work at all presumably due to the
missing DirectX dependencies. For some reason this sometimes extends to
transparent GIFs as well, for an example see msn.com top left or:

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/96/35/index2a.html

in Mozilla, then IE under Wine. In Mozilla, works fine every time. In
IE/Wine it works sometimes, other times the transparency is missing or
the wrong color (at least here). It's not a big issue so I don't intend
to investigate further, but it might prove useful in building web pages.

thanks -mike

On Tue, 2002-11-05 at 22:38, Jeremy Newman wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-11-05 at 16:15, Igor Izyumin wrote:
> > IE has broken png support, as well.
> 
> Yes it does doesn't it. So far the only ones that support PNG are
> Mozilla, Opera and Konqueror. I tested Konq 2.2, it got the transparency
> right, but not the shadow and the anti-aliasing of the image to the
> background color.
> 
> Looks like I may have to fall back to GIF, since PNG is not supported.
> Unless someone knows of a workaround. I created my images in Gimp.
> 
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