Sean’s Blog

Transparent PNGs with IE

Yesterday I finally got around to doing some cleanup on the site.  I forget sometimes how easy CMSs like Wordpress actually make publishing and writing on the web.  That is until I actually have to go into my website and edit some of the old HTML pages by hand in vi.  That is what I spent some time doing yesterday.

One of the big things I fixed was that apparently IE 5.5 and IE 6 where showing my logo which has a transparent background with some weird gray around it. This was unnoticed by me for a long time since I only use Firefox.  Apparently, IE5.5 and IE6 have a problem dealing with a transparent backgrounds in certain image types (pngs, which my logo was).

What I found was that there was a javascript workaround available.  Although it meant adding a javascript file to my server and 3 lines of code to each page, the problem is now taken care of.

Here is the link to a page that both explains the problem better as well as provides the details of the solution.

IE7 and Firefox shouldn’t have any of these display problems so if you never noticed it, that may be why.