Defacto theme style.css

Post by **Don Chambers** » Sun Feb 19, 2006 4:42 pm

judebert wrote:....Yours is smaller...

HEY! Let's watch those kinds of comments!!

Well, everything on my site seems OK in both IE and FF for now. Still have some more tweaking to do, but looks like most of the difficult stuff is done. Now I need to figure out the RSS stuff.... but I suspect that type of conversation is better placed in the "general" discussion.

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 8:32 pm

Don, sorry to pour cold water, I'm finding that your .png's are badly warped in IE6. Also the serendipity logo is warped to such an extent that your whole design is borked. A screenshot is here

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 9:16 pm

carl_galloway wrote:Don, sorry to pour cold water, I'm finding that your .png's are badly warped in IE6. Also the serendipity logo is warped to such an extent that your whole design is borked. A screenshot is here

Hmm... I'm not seeing that myself. I am using IE 6 w/SP2. Here are 2 screen shots I just snapped from IE: 1024x768 and 1280 x 1024

They both look fine to me. I do remember seeing something odd the other day. I originally had the comment smilies not showing by default, then I changed them to always show. The first time I loaded it in IE, I noticed 2 of them were larger than the rest.... the next time I hit that page, they were all the same, normal size.

You were actually my inspiration for category icons Carl!! The ones I am using are still just an idea in the back of my head, but they are definitely PNG files, and not GIFs.

Anyway, is anyone else having difficulty viewing this page? Please forgive the content - I am just playing around with it right now. No one even knows it is there as it is outside the navigational structure of the rest of my site.

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 9:26 pm

IE is one of the buggiest pieces of %^# I've ever come across, and one thing I've noticed is that if I view a page with transparent .png's on the pc where the images reside, then IE doesn't have a problem. But if the images have to be downloaded, that is when they cause problems.

I suspect it might have something to do with windows explorer and the thumbs.db file. Windows is quite capable of using transparent .png's and I think windows explorer and IE share their cache in some instances. So if you view a transparent .png in windows explorer first, then use IE everything works. Problem is that your website users don't have the images on their pc's. Does this sound plausible, or are these just the symptoms of a different problem?

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 9:40 pm

That might make some sense. However, your theme tester site has transparent pngs in them, and they look fine to me, and those files have never been on my local computer. Also, I just took my wife's laptop, which has never connected to the site before, and it looked fine with IE.

What version of IE are you using? Still hoping others might comment back if they also see a problem.

I have mentioned this several times on this site - I have just about enough knowledge in all this stuff to be dangerous!

) I am getting a heck of an education though, and with continued help from experts like you, I hope to be in a position to contribute something back.

Post by **Don Chambers** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 9:51 pm

By the way - I wasn't logged in those past 2 posts. Can one of you moderators change that post from "guest" to me?

Something I also forgot to mention on my last post - if PNGs are such a problem for other browsers, why is the s9y logo, and all the smiles, distributed in that form instead of gif???

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 9:54 pm

Bugger, that kills that theory - That particular pc is running windows xp home with sp2, and IE6. Its configured to automatically update itself so should be as current as the snapshot on microsoft.com.

I've just deleted my cache, cleared the history etc, and it still does the same thing. Firefox and Opera both work as you intended. The good news is that it obviously isn't a theme or serendipity issue, but given that you have spent so much energy creating such a wonderful blog it is a shame to have those .png's cause problems. It would be interesting to see if other users have the same problem because I doubt you want your real site visitors to experience this.

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 9:58 pm

As for using .png's, Serendipity is a volunteer project, and the current owners of the .gif format are quite happy to legally challenge projects that ship with .gif formatted images. I doubt that Jannis and Garvin have the time/money/motivation to fight these sorts of legal proceedings.

Post by **Don Chambers** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 10:31 pm

I certainly do NOT want other visitors experieicing that, but I suspect you wouldn't want it either..... You didn't comment about your theme tester site. As I said, it uses transparent pngs, have you had anyone report problems viewing that site? Also, the s9y emoticons and the s9y logos are pngs, so ANYONE running s9y, who happens to make use of PNGS, would be in the same position, wouldn't they?

Now - the only thing I wonder about is the fact that all of my backgrounds are pngs (with the exception of page background, ie outside the mainpane). So, I have pngs on top of pngs, if you will. Wonder if that could be an issue. Nothing stopping me from re-generating everything as GIF other than the fact that png produces much nicer results.

I read some interesting stuff here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF

Certain takeaways:

"In December 1994, after Unisys discovered that the newly-popular (GIF) file format used LZW compression, they announced that they would be seeking royalties on that patent; all commercial programs capable of producing GIF files would be required to pay a license fee to Unisys."

That one would suggest a program shipping with bundled GIF images (like emoticons) would not present a problem - they are merely using the image, not PRODUCING the image.

"Unfortunately many people are under the misconception that Internet Explorer does not support transparent pngs. This results from confusion of alpha channel transparency (which GIF does not offer) with binary transparency (which Internet Explorer supports for both GIF and PNG images)."

This one seems to completely contradict any problems with transparent pngs.

On June 20, 2003, the United States patent on the LZW algorithm expired, which means that Unisys and Compuserve can no longer collect royalties for use of the GIF format in that country. Those bothered with the patent enforcement dubbed this day GIF Liberation Day. The equivalent patents in Europe and Japan expired on June 18 and June 20, 2004 respectively, with the Canadian patent following on July 7.

IBM has also patented the LZW algorithm, but has never enforced this patent. According to the Free Software Foundation that patent will expire on August 11, 2006 in the United States.

Looks like this entire issue will be a moot point in a few months anyway.

But that still leaves me with a potential problem for visitors... do I scrap all things png???

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 3:19 am

Don, haven't had any complaints about my themes site but then I suspect most of the people using it are other theme designers and most of them probably use Firefox by default. I did however get some quite nasty comments from users when I first released my Connections theme, and had to change the arrows in the calendar pretty quickly. I learned that lesson quickly, even though I personally like .png's over .gif's.

As for the copyright issues, I haven't had the inclination to check up on that so thank you for shedding light on an issue that has become an urban myth.

Carl

Post by **Don Chambers** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 4:03 am

Carl - I'm no expert, but your themes are obviously legendary in the s9y community! You really have your stuff together - coding and design!!! Those 2 elements are often mutually exclusive, IMHO.

I too created calendar arrows, and guess what, they are png format. I'm seriously wondering whether to reformat all my graphics to gif or jpg (no transparency on JPG).

The "official" news is that IE should fully support transparent pngs, but functionally, that may not necessarily be the case. Real PITA when I test this stuff on my own equipment, using different browsers, and it turns out OK, then another person has problems! My current project is a tiny matter, but I have larger projects in mind!

FYI - no one else has reported problems yet, but I am not sure how popular these forums are. I might call on some friends to hit my blog site and tell me if they are havning problems without revealing the existence of it just yet.... not quite ready to go live. Still have so much to digest!

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 4:16 am

I find it very hard to live up to the hype, most of the other designers out there are far more talented than me, I think I just happened to get noisy when the forums were experiencing a lull. Actually, some of the newer designers have been helping me for a change.

As for the popularity of these forums, quite a lot of the users are in Germany, so different time zone and interests. I'm in the Antipodes so always 12 hours different from Europe, and often find I have to wait a full 36-48 hours before I get feedback.

:excited: tell me about the bigger projects, how about a theme that mimics CNN or Reuters. Or perhaps a blog written in flash?

Post by **Don Chambers** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 5:19 am

Carl - you are being far too modest. Your contributions are distinguished. I personally get very motivated when I encounter someone such as yourself, and others like Garvin, Judebert, etc.... I know so little about this stuff, but it is very rewarding to see people like yourselves contribute your knowledge to those of us who know nothing by comparison. I'm determined, but I lack the technological expertise.

I cannot discuss my "other idea" just yet because I do not yet know if it has potential. However, if you can find the base site for my s9y blog, then you will discover a means to contact me personally. I do not mean to be evasive, just trying to limit the amout of spam I receive these days!!!!

I gather you are "down under"... is this correct? If so, I envy the weather you are probably enjoying right now. Probably better than here in Chicago, IL, USA!!!

costa · Post by **costa** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 8:50 am

carl_galloway wrote:I've just deleted my cache, cleared the history etc, and it still does the same thing. Firefox and Opera both work as you intended. The good news is that it obviously isn't a theme or serendipity issue, but given that you have spent so much energy creating such a wonderful blog it is a shame to have those .png's cause problems. It would be interesting to see if other users have the same problem because I doubt you want your real site visitors to experience this.

same here. i do not use internet explorer but sadly we all have to test the templates and make them ie compatible because of its popularity. it looks to me like an explorers problem. it is not reading dimensions correctly and here we go with a messy look. maybe the png itself has something to do with that. but i hardly can believe that.

looks like ie is a complete waste of time to browse the net with. it does not have proper support for png's. another funny thing: i opened one ie's window and i saw this messy png. i opened another window to test things on my own site - no pngs at all. buttons, serendipity icon - all gone!

man, this browser is a serius crap.

owen: do not use transparent pngs if you want to stay compatible with ie. just don't use them. it will not show them properly. forget about pngs transparency under ie.

CoSTa

Post by **Don Chambers** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 4:01 pm

Thanks for checking CoSTa. So, I guess I need to change the following, but I am going to need some s9y input here:

1)Emoticons are transparent pngs.. Can I use this plugin, but substitute GIF images, and are there GIF image libraries out there, or do I need to create these things myself (or save them off this phpBB)?

2) The arrow keys seem to be looking for png files. Where can I instruct s9y to use a different file name?

3) The s9y banner is a png, but does not have any obvious transparency to it, but that does not mean it wasn't saved with that attribute. Is there a GIF version of the banner, and if so, where can I instruct s9y to use that file instead?

If any of these things are not in the admin suite, it might be nice to offer them in an upcoming release IMHO.