+1 This works well for us and I'd love to remove the complexity from our build process. We've dropped the transparency loader for some time now and it's solved a lot of our IE6 bugginess (including random hard browser lockups!).
On 6-Aug-09, at 11:29 AM, Joel Webber wrote: > > If we want to support IE6 fully (which I hate having to do, but it's > hard to argue with the fact that it still account for ~20% of the > market, depending upon whose stats you use), then I think this is > basically the only approach that will work. We all agree that the > DirectX filter is far too memory hungry, especially on the old > machines that are often still running IE6. Bundling images with > disparate palettes into a single 8-bit image is far too > unpredictable, which seems pretty unacceptable to me. So I will > argue that we should, on IE6: > - Leave GIFs alone. > - Turn PNGs with transparency into GIFs. > - Open question: How should we clamp the [0, 255] alpha channel to > [0, 1]? In our experience, every transparency clamping preset will result in artifacts in IE6 for some subset of images. To simplify things, I'd suggest mapping alpha of 0 to transparent, and alpha of 1-255 -> opaque. If the developer needs more control, they can convert the image to a GIF by hand. Alternatively, it might be useful to allow a developer to specify a fallback IE6-only image. For quantization of partially transparent PNG to GIF, I highly recommend the algorithm behind this tool: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~dekker/NEUQUANT.HTML There's already a Java version of the code available. > - Bundle only those images without transparency into PNGs. > - Stop using the DirectX filter altogether. > > Does anyone have any really strong objection to this approach? It > will add some extra requests on IE6 under some circumstances, but > that's got to be better than either (a) completely mangling bundled > images, or (b) blowing massive amounts of memory. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
