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So Bob asks me for a site design for his new LJ username and guess what happens:
Site design COMPLETE!
And I’m damn proud of it, too. It relies heavily on PNG transparency. What’s that you say? IE doesn’t support PNG transparency? Well let me tell you a little something something, mister! [warning nerd speak ahead]
Okay so yeah, IE is a retard and doesn’t have native support for PNGs with alpha transparency. Me ‘n the gang at #4toontellers, though, were brainstorming a few ways of overcoming this.
First of all, there was some god-awfully long and complicated PHP extraction process, but that wouldn’t work since LiveJournal pages cannot be PHP.
Then, we came across a JavaScript technique that seemed slightly simpler, and I tried implementing it, and… okay, LiveJournal doesn’t allow JavaScript code
So third, we come across this freaky easy CSS approach that takes nothing to implement. Woo! So there you have the giant corner images that just blend into the grid background.
The only problem is, this works for images that use the IMG tag, but not PNGs that are used as background images in tables. So the blog tables in the site design will appear slightly different in IE (read: opaque). Firefox (to which I’ve decided to switch over) and other non-stupid (read: IE) browsers will display the tables in a really awesome semi-transparent fading doohickey awesome.
Oh and it took a really long time to get rid of unnecessary scrollbars and to keep some elements static while others scroll. Woo! But it was a great exercise in CSS and it taught me a lot. Good and fun times.

10 comments

  3. question
    I am using stupid, I mean, Internet Explorer, and I’m guessing the post was supposed to be see through. Unfortuntely, I have no means of checking if it actually shows up see through since I’m in Europe and have no computer of my own, but I would be very interested in coding methods which I could implement into a livejournal layout of my own. could I get some sample code?
    -Arthur

    Reply

    1. Re: question
      I don’t understand what you means by see-through. Well I mean um. Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror, Netscape (?), etc. etc. should be able to display the blog tables in the correct fashion, while Internet Explorer doesn’t, but it’s at least satisfactory.
      As for sample code, sure indeed. The only problem is that only paid members can completely modify page layout, but LJ has an easy form to piece everything together, and I can give you a bunch of starting code from Bob’s layout and my layout to get you goin’.

      Reply

  4. The site design is great. Because I looked at it in IE first (damn mIRC), I had a look at the source code and saw the style filters you were using and thought “uh oh, this is gonna look horrible in mozilla”. But that’s a nice way round IE’s retardness.

    Reply

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