Hello. I am Jessica Fowler, a web developer that doodles, codes, and writes. Interested in working together?

Speaking to you about the importance of testing is like preaching to the choir. What browsers do you test on? If you develop on a PC, do you also check on the Mac? I basically ignore IE on Mac because that has the most quirks and the fewest users according to various logs I check. Safari on Mac, however, I rarely have problems with. If it works in Firefox, it usually renders the same in Safari.

Surprise.

Originally I had images on this site saved as PNG because it was a smaller file size with higher quality. I didn’t do transparencies with it since IE 6 has issues with that. But it seems PNG renders a little differently, color-wise, on Safari than the other browsers. What a “Gotcha.”

I had to convert the graphics to .gif and now there should be no odd color differences between page edge and page background.

It seems this is not a new problem:

In older versions of Opera and in pre-Tiger Safari, PNG colors don’t match CSS colors when there is no color space information stored in the PNG files. Also some old Mac versions of Mozilla and Netscape 6 applied a gamma change to unlabeled PNGs. - The Sad Story of PNG Gamma “Correction”

And in other news, there may be PNG color oddities in IE. More testing will be necessary since I saw no noticiable difference in IE when I used PNGs.

Lesson learned:
When color consistency is necessary, beware the PNG.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 8:59 am and is filed under Web, Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.