6 January, 2005

Internet Explorer Inferiority… Again

I’ve had a major gripe with Microsoft Internet Explorer for some years now, in it’s inability to handle PNG files correctly. Being able to use PNG files gives web developers some serious benefits in being able to make overlaid, semitransparent (non-binary transparency) images, compress files smaller, etc.

So, yeh – pretty much every web browser on the market has had near-perfect PNG support since 1998, and Internet Explorer has always been lagging behind (that’s why the ‘mugshots’ on abnib look ‘wrong’ in IE). But here’s the worst of it: I’ve just discovered that the MacOS version of Internet Explorer (yes; also by Microsoft) 5 – which was released almost five years ago – has excellent support for PNG graphics! That’s crazy!

It’s not that I’m affected directly – I don’t touch IE with a barge pole: my issue is that, as a web developer, I can’t take advantage of any of the shiny features of a decade-old technology, simply because the so-called ‘market leader’ hasn’t been bothered to finish writing a few hundred lines of code yet!

Okay. I’m breathing normally again now.

The Stigma Of The Amiga

LiveJournal Sells

Following up yesterday’s rumours, it can now be seen that, officially, LiveJournal has been sold to SixApart. The details look pretty good – the service will remain much as-it-is, nobody will be ‘migrated’ to TypePad or MoveableType, and – better yet – LiveJournal might actually (finally) get some much-needed new features, such as trackback (which can be seen in effect right here, on my post yesterday – this post will be linked as a ‘trackback’ comment, because this post follows it up – with trackback, this kind of thing can be posted cross-journal, too).

Ah; Computers

Heh! Celoxis, a web-based project management tool we‘ve been experimenting with, e-mailed me twice today – just past midnight, and half an hour later – to remind me that it will be my birthday on Saturday (in case I didn’t know). Better yet, our mail server picked up on these e-mails and flagged them as ‘spam’. Wonderful.