On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 4:34 AM, Tgr <gtisza(a)gmail.com> wrote:
You could use PNG8 with a color palette where every
color is black, with a
variable level of transparency. That would be equivalent to full PNG32 alpha
transparency in modern browsers (as long as the only color used in the formulas
is black), while IE5.5/6 would have binary transparency without any aliasing -
ugly but probably not horrible. (See
http://www.v-methods.com/ji/palette_alpha.html for a demonstration.)
I thought of this, but the images would probably be too ugly for IE6
users to be acceptable. Remember, we're talking about making things
uglier for 15% of our users (everyone who uses IE6 on math articles)
for the benefit of well under 1% of our users (the ones who view
equations on non-white backgrounds in non-IE6 browsers). That's just
not a reasonable tradeoff. Either it has to be demonstrated that IE6
PNG transparency fixes perform well even on pages with lots of
equations, or people will just have to manually adjust background
colors if they really care.
I've whitelisted \definecolor and \pagecolor in r59550. I'm resolving
bug 8 as LATER, and suggest it only be reopened when either IE6
reaches <1% market share, or it can be demonstrated that we can do
transparency without significantly hurting IE6 users' experience when
reading math articles.