Making .gif backgrounds transparent

[jonathan lall]

Regarding the copyright, this is more or less true, but I seem to recall Unisys sueing large commerical websites for not making their GIFs with a licensed product. Either way, it doesn't matter at all to most people for the most part. I think of it this way: is there any reason to use GIFs instead of the W3C-standard PNG format? Note: PNG isn't a replacement for JPEG, and while it can handle high colour unlike GIF, it doesn't do it as well as JPEG.

You've got a long time to wait for IE's full PNG support, especially since Brian Countryman, Program Manager in Internet Explorer, recently said that they may or may not support alpha-transparency in the next release. This was right after he declared that IE6 SP1 is the final version of IE as a seperate program as we know it (it will be integrated into Longhorn's install to evade legalities, but will likely remain seperate like it is now). This is fairly unfortunate, because it means that webdesigners have to wait untill 2005 when Microsoft will presumably put out a browser that can do all of CSS1. By that time though, Opera 8 and Mozilla's Browser will be far ahead.