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scribblers

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 28, 2003
6
0
We've been trying to create a corbis.com-like animation for a client. However, the difference is that our site has a graphic in PNG format (with a transparent background on its own layer) that overlaps a small portion of the animation. See it here: http://www.scribblegraphics.com/cldcom/index.html

The animation works fine on PCs and on a Mac using Safari, but doesn't work properly when using IE on a Mac.

Can someone figure out the problem here?
 
I strongly doubt that IE for Mac meets current web standards. One of those standards is PNG animations.

There was a thread on FunMac.com that dealt with Safari 1.0 not being up to standards, as, at the time, it couldn't recognize PNG animations. This is the thread: http://www.funmac.com/showthread.php?t=3753
 
IE Mac is a dead browser. It does a horrible job rendering most sites, and MS has made the declaration that they will no longer be updating it. I don't know the exact numbers but I would very much doubt that many people are still using this browser. You could always do a browser detect and send IE 4 users to a text only version of the page.
 
not to quibble (by which i mean: quibblequibblequibble) but IE/Mac was, at the time, a pretty good browser. it's dated now, but that's because Microsoft killed it, not because it was ever a bad browser. it actually had decent CSS/DOM support for its generation, and introduced some things like text zooming that have made their way into plenty of other browsers... but not, oddly, IE/Win.

although, rereading your post, i realize you only said it's old and undeveloped, not bad. so i guess i'm not really disagreeing with you.
 
Simple solution

I would build that whole top section, including the PNG 'shield', into a flash file. It would be a ridiculously simple thing to do, as the animation itself is so basic, and flash handles transparent PNGs and such. Then use a flash sniffer to send the 1% of people without the flash player to a static HTML version of the page.
 
I have to say I am little surprised since IE Mac was one of the first browsers to actually support transparent PNG's. I suppose the problem lies with the animation. I don't really have enough expertise in javascript to help you much there, but that is what I think.

I agree that you may want to consider using Flash for this. Flash would make this look the same on any browser with the plug-in (which is to say almost all) and would clear up the issue. I normally don't use Flash for my designs (being a XHTML/CSS guy myself), but when it comes to animated sequences and so forth, it is very useful.
 
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