Not a specific BV question ... but for those of you who have deployed BV sites:

1. Do you use PNGs?

2. Do you support IE6?

Just wondering. I'm trying to incorporate several pngs but no "workaround" out there is allowing them to work well in IE6. At this point I'm thinking about either abandoning the PNGS and reworking the site or basically saying "screw you" to anyone not use IE7, FF, Opera or some other current browser that supports PNG.

What do you all think on which direction I should go.


Thanks - wayde

A big yes to both. Unless you know that your demographic is made up entirely of Mac users or web-standards geeks, you have to support IE6.

I use PNG a lot, both transparent and not. PNGs that aren't transparent are generally fine. Those which are transparent, and depending on the way I'm using it, I'll usually avoid hacking transparency and simply replace the transparent PNGs with GIFs in IE6 and lower using conditional comments to load a specific <IE6 stylesheet, if doing so doesn't ruin the design.

If you want to preserve transparency of PNGs in IE6, you don't have to use javascript, which is kind of an older method. You can use IE's proprietary CSS filters. Google AlphaImageLoader.

Just be creative with how you utilize them and supporting all semi-modern browsers will be a breeze. Even in IE6, once you get used to it's quirks and figure out solutions for it's wildest bugs, designing a site to look exactly the same in IE6/7/Opera/Firefox/Safari is completely possible.