Well, it appears that this website is finally beginning to take shape. Ironically, I have chosen the washed out X200 to use as my background. Admitted this is not one of the better techniques for use in web design. Why you may ask would I want to use the X200 as a background on my site? It is small, weak, and flimsy, perhaps one of the worst notebooks ever made. Well, the first reason is that I decided to take a picture of this particular machine, because it was giving Rusty so much trouble at work. The next reason was that I happened to discover that it turned out nicely when I put it through the cutout filter. I think it has something to do with the color, and lighting of the picture. Also, it gave enough visual meat to satiate my aesthetic hunger. At least it is for now any way. In short, I chose it because it looks nice, not because I have any emotional attachment to it.
In my development efforts I discovered a critical problem that I did not know existed in the old work horse that is Internet Explorer, it is unable to natively, correctly load PNG files. I found this to be particularly irritating since I used it twice in my original design. First, in my nifty title, I chose PNG because it can more correctly show transparency that the old school GIF format. I found a script called “sleight” that basically goes through and loads all your images using IE’s proprietary alpha image loader function. It all works out ok in the end though; since all other modern browsers fully support PNG (I used Firebird as my development platform for the site). The real problem occurred when I was using a simple 1×1 pixel gray PNG that created a translucent background for this content area. Basically, I wanted to add a little more clarity to the text over the washed out background image. I didn’t take much work to modify the sleight script to load background images with the alpha loader. But, the problem was that I had to scaling in order to have the pixel fill the background, this would only work if the DIV was a fixed size. I was not willing to make that concession. At this point I have decided only to have the PNG be the background for browsers other that IE. I have accomplished this by using a redirect in my CSS for the site (IE doesn’t understand it so it skips it). Sorry for you folks, but the text is a little harder to read. Taking that fact into consideration I did wash out the X200 a bit more.