sootman's Journal: Microsoft: It's 1996 again!

According to this post, MS is recommending that people use transparent GIFs, not PNGs, in Gadgets. Because even though the PNG standard is about a decade old, MSIE famously can't deal with alpha transparency very well,* and I guess something along those lines is sticking it browser-crashing nose into Gadgets in Vista.

Do they have any plans to fix this? Of course not! From the post: "I would encourage you to change to using transparent GIF moving forward... the SDK will be updated with this new info in our next release."

Can you fucking believe that? Abandon PNG... moving forward?!?!?

* MSIE, by default, only deals with GIF-style, transparent-or-not transparency in PNGs. There are workarounds but as far as simplicity goes they're a far cry from the plain old <img src> tag that any other browser can use.