[Clipart] Re: The PNG problem in Windows Internet Explorer

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

"Jonadab the Unsightly One" <jonadab at bright.net> writes:

> We don't want the site to be totally unviewable in earlier versions,
> but if the background colour of the images is off, that seems like a
> pretty minor problem for a browser that old.  (And I suspect it's
> not our worst problem; the CSS layout probably breaks too, in 4.x if
> not in 5.0.

Okay, for the first installment of this, I installed Win95 OSR2 (on
VMWare Workstation) and had a look at the site using IE 3.0.  The site
is *theoretically* navigable and usable (which I think speaks well of
our design, frankly), but it's sure not pretty.  Among other things...

 * Almost all images on the site cannot display, because PNG is not
   supported by IE 3.0 at all, period.  You see a little red X where
   each image would be.

 * CSS is pretty much totally unsupported as well, so it's like the
   stylesheets aren't even there.  This has rather significant
   implications for the layout (lots of vertical scrolling is needed,
   and Win95 doesn't support scrollmice either), also for colors, and
   so on.

 * The XML declaration leaks out into the page, because IE3 doesn't
   understand that it's part of the markup.
   
 * On the Wiki, the navigation options (including "edit the text of
   this page") aren't visible.

Screenshots available upon request.

However, this is a really old and quite pathetic browser, and anyone
who's still using it must be accustomed to most of the web not
displaying as intended, if at all.  (When I started using this OS back
when I got my first non-secondhand PC, the first thing I used IE for
was to download Navigator 4.0.)

I'll try to dig up the Win98 SE CD and have a look at it in IE4 next.
That should be a little better.

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