BIP principia mirror

[faust]

On and off I have been working on a html book presentation of the bip (blatantly ripping off Laurens format)   located here
http://www.principiadiscordia.com/bip/1.php

working off crams edition of the pdf
mirrored here:
http://principiadiscordia.com/Black_Iron_Prison_July2007_booklet.pdf

and am looking for help and feedback about the layout.

first question to any html wizards out there, I want an image behind certain blocks of text, however whenever I add it in as a background image in the table cell, an odd thing happens, if the image transparency is set to less then or equal to 50% opaque, it is completely invisible, if it is set to 51% or more the image is completely opaque, blocking out the block of text its over.
is this a weird html thing, or something creepy about photoshop?

[LHX]

fucking with transparency on the web is still near impossible

still something in its infancy

unless you are using Flash

or you format the image in Illustrator / Photoshop before you put it online

[faust]

see, I do that(photoshop cs3 is what I am using hope its not buggy), but it still loads the image as either completely opaque or invisible.
maybe it needs metadata in the file or something.
or my format? I used gif, so maybe png or something... would that make a difference

[LHX]

Internet Explorer doesnt support transparency with PNG

so gif is the right option


make sure that your picture IS being exported out of photoshop with the transparency because the default in photoshop is to export with a white background


if that doesnt work - id be able to take a look at it

it might even be worthwhile to use CSS for inserting the BG image

[Triple Zero]

GIF only has 1-bit transparency. so either it's transparent or it isn't, just like you describe.

PNG has 8-bit transparency, but this is not supported by IE6 and lower.

i can have a look at the HTML code and stuff another time (it's the middle of the night here)

[Triple Zero]

addition for clarity: with 8-bit transparency i mean 256 levels of transparency (should be more than enough for most purposes)

and, IE7 does support png transparency (about fucking time, IMO)

[faust]

cheers guys, will try this in the morning and report back, time to sleep now.