Not for The Faint-Hearted

[caraig]

Just had to get this off my shoulders:

The MSIE devteam, the guys who code and put together the 'dominant' browser on the PC, to wit, Microsoft Internet Explorer, are one of the following:

• corporate wage-slaves who get the most inane directives imaginable from the main office and have no choice but to do as they say; or


• bumbling absent-minded coders who forget the very basics of rendering in favor of the short and quick way and who don't care about web standards whatsoever.

PNG has a neat little 8-bit transparency channel. Works great in Safari. Works great in Camino. Works great in Mozilla, Netscape, Opera. Hell, IE for the Macintosh handles it perfectly fine. IE handles the PNG transparency channel with a medium shade of grey replacing it. DAMMIT!

This means that for the web design project I'm working on, I need to convert these really pretty PNGs over to... GIFs. Lossy, dithered, smudged, LT256-color GIFs. Because only GIFs handle transparencies. 1-bit alpha channels, too, natch. And MS isn't going to be updating this latest iteration of IE until they come out with Windows 2004.

KNAVES! Charlatans! This is what the 'dominance' of the industry gets you, folks. Complacent, devil-may-care and damn-the-consumer, standards-ignoring crufty bloatware.

Ah, well. MS will get theirs, eventually, I hope. Pax.

Comments

[buran.livejournal.com]

Or you could do what all the moronic M$-grovelling webmasters do and just put up a redirector that says "You need to upgrade your browser. Please download one of these fine pieces of software..." and not let them view the site until they do.

Hey, they do it to US often enough. :p Payback time!

[yotogi.livejournal.com]

I was actually there to watch caraig flip out about this. A man reduced to a mere cinder of his former self, over the lack of 7 bits worth of alpha channel.

The yelling could be heard on the moon, but on the other hand, I'm sure the wailing of the lost and the damned are fairly commonplace to the MSIE development group.