Web Devout tidings

If you’re interested in some more of my technology-related writings, I’ve recently been posting on Tech Center Current, the blog for the California Community Colleges Technology Center where I currently work. Most of the posts are less advanced and less industry-centric than I typically make here, and posts are divided into three different levels of technical familiarity, so it reaches to a wider audience. Although I may be going to work for either Microsoft or Mozilla in the near future, I’ll act as an invited expert on the Tech Center Current blog for a while after.

I finally figured out why Safari was displaying the heading backgrounds on the main Web Devout site too dark: In general, Safari 2.0 seems to screw up the brightness or gamma correction on 1-pixel by 1-pixel alphatransparent PNGs. This is even true for PNGs which don’t have any gamma correction information included. Interestingly, if you change the image size to anything else, the brightness problem goes away. Why does Safari decide to darken 1×1 PNGs? Your guess is as good as mine.

I was using a repeating 1×1 alphatransparent PNG as the background in order to simulate an RGBA value in a CSS 2.x-compatible way. To fix the problem in Safari, I simply changed the image size to 2×1.

I just wanted to point this out in case anyone else runs into it and becomes stumped like I was for a while. The problem seems unique to Safari/WebKit; Konqueror doesn’t seem to have this problem.

Frankly, this is just one of a seemingly endless list of bang-your-head-on-the-desk bugs I regularly find in Safari in quite basic areas. Another one that bothered me for a while was that background images in Safari will repeat if the box is shorter or thinner than the background image even if you have background-repeat: no-repeat;, which you’ll notice if you also use a background-position. This just shows that passing something like Acid2 first doesn’t necessarily mean you’re the cream of the crop. Please exterminate these weird bugs.